Notable Quotable

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“If you look at the history of currency, gold has a unique role and I don’t think it’s accidental. Some people say that if gold hadn’t been selected as a currency thousands of years ago, it would not have a role today. I don’t agree. Gold has a lot of useful properties and unique features so I don’t think its status is in any way accidental. It’s a monetary asset and I think if you replayed history another way, you would come out with gold again.”

Ken Rogoff
Harvard University

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Notable Quotable

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“Perhaps what gives us the highest conviction on commodities as an asset class is not the similarities to historical bull markets but the differences. In particular we continue to believe that the global focus on climate mitigation strategies and decarbonisation is limiting the supply response to higher prices to an extent that is unprecedented. That breakage of the link between higher prices and a supply response is likely to significantly extend the commodities bull market. When we combine these factors to our belief that we are entering a fundamentally more inflationary age, the case for an enlarged commodities allocation remains compelling.” – Schroders, client advisory

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Notable Quotable

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“I grew up in a purely urban family. We had no relatives in the country. I’m born in 1944. When I was a baby, my mother could only buy food because she still had some gold coins. Without gold, I would have starved. She always told me that. Therefore, this generation already has a certain gold affinity. In extreme times of crisis, this is one of the few things left to be accepted. Gold was the only thing left to the people of the city at that time. Before the silver cutlery was also traded at the farmer.”

Ewald Nowotny
Former European Central Bank governor

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Notable Quotable

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“It’s extremely important to know history, but the trouble is that the big events in financial history occur only once every few generations. In the investment environment, memory and the resultant prudence regularly do battle with greed, and greed tends to win out. Prudence is particularly dismissed when risky investments have paid off for a span of years. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that the outstanding characteristics of financial markets are shortness of memory and ignorance of history. In hot times, the few who do remember the past are dismissed as relics of the old, lacking the ability to imagine the new. But it invariably turns out that there’s nothing new in terms of investor behavior. Mark Twain said that ‘history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,’ and what rhymes are the important themes.”

Howard Marks
Oaktree Management

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Notable Quotable

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“Today, there is a spreading awareness that our monetary situation is rather rotten. Leaving things up to central bankers, who are obviously making it up as they go along, has not worked out very well. Most recently, these central bankers got very aggressive in response to Covid in 2020; and the “inflation” that has followed has not been very surprising. People generally find monetary affairs to be extremely confusing. But, in the end it really amounts to a choice of two alternatives: The Gold Standard, and the PhD Standard.” – Nathan Lewis, Forbes

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Notable Quotable

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“I’ve been saying for years that central banks can never step away from this. They can threaten to. And they can bluff, and they can do some probing bets like they did last year, and the market may fall for that, or call that bluff in the short term. But yes I think we’re in a position now where central banks can never back away, which sort of begs the question how can this ever end. Can asset markets get inflated forever?”

Mark Spitznagel
Universa
Bloomberg interview

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“The [2008] crisis convinced me that greed, ego, fear, short-sightedness, group-think and other human foibles have at least as much, if not more, to do with financial behaviour as rational thinking does.”

Mike Silva
Former chief of staff to New York Fed president Tim Geithner
(Speech to the LBMA, October 2018)

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Notable Quotable

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“The shrewder speculators* became alarmed. They began to sell their shares of stock, and hoard in gold the enormous wealth they had acquired. This resulted in a demand on the government for metal in exchange for its paper, and soon the government had no metal to give. Then the crash came. Those who had the government paper could buy nothing with it. Those who held the Mississippi stock could scarce give it away. It was worthless. The government itself refused to accept its own paper for taxes. A few lucky speculators had made vast fortunes; but thousands of families, especially among the wealthier classes, were ruined.”

Edward S. Ellis and Charles F. Home
The Story of the Greatest Nations (1900)

* Please see this link for a summary of  Law’s Mississippi Company land scheme.

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“Finally, the U.S. got very rich by doing QE. But the license for QE came from the ‘lowflation’ regime enabled by cheap exports coming from Russia and China. Naturally, the top of the global economic food chain – the U.S. – doesn’t want the lowflation regime to end, but if Chimerica and Eurussia are over as unions, the lowflation regime will have to end, period. As we noted in our prior dispatch, the special relationship between China and Russia (‘Chussia’) is a powerful one: a marriage of commodities and industry, uniting the largest commodity producer (Russia) and the factory of the world (China), potentially in control of Eurasia.”

Zoltan Pozsar
Credit Suisse

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“John Locke, the British philosopher whose ideas fuelled the American Revolution, had a theory of knowledge and perception, which I always found annoying. Asked if we have an idea of the substance behind our perceptions, he said we had ‘no such clear idea at all, and therefore signify nothing by the word substance but only an uncertain supposition of we know not what’. The philosophical debate has moved on in the centuries since Locke wrote. But his idea captures well the uneasy state of the world’s financial markets. They are driven in the short run by perceptions, not reality. If many have the wrong impression, markets will move on that. But in the long run, markets move on matters of substance. And at present the economic substance is a ‘something we know not what.'”

John Authers
Financial Times

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“For a variety of reasons it is likely that central banks that hold gold will tend to husband their reserves and that some with low levels of reserves will acquire more. Gold goes where the money is. After moving from the colonial world to Europe, to the United States, back to Europe it is now moving to the emerging economies of Asia. This is consistent with the view that central bank’s gold position signals economic power and prestige.”

James Steel
Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation

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“The population of the world is increasing at the rate of five thousand four hundred every hour. A small percentage of these people will become gold hoarders, people who are frightened of currencies, who like to bury some sovereigns in the garden or under the bed. Another percentage needs gold fillings for their teeth. Others need gold-rimmed spectacles, jewelry, engagement rings. All these new people will be taking tons of gold off the market every year. New industries need gold wire, gold plating, amalgams of gold. It is brilliant, malleable, ductile, almost unalterable and more dense than any of the common metals except platinum. There’s no end to its uses. But it has two defects. It isn’t hard enough. It wears out quickly, leaving itself on the linings of our pockets, and in the sweat of our skin. Every year, the world’s stock is invisibly reduced by friction. I said that gold has two defects…The other, and by far the major defect, is that it is the talisman of fear. Fear, Mr Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day. In a period of history when every tomorrow may be the evil day, it is fair enough to say that a fat proportion of the gold that is taken out of one corner of the Earth is at once buried again in another corner.”

Ian Fleming
Goldfinger

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“I don’t buy gold, I own it. I don’t buy gold at $1,100 because I think it’s going to go to $1,200. I buy it for what it does, not what the price is, the price is the last consideration for me. I think the way the picture has been developing over the last eight years, it’s like when you take a polaroid, you take a picture and you sit there and you watch this thing and it slowly comes into focus, and that’s what it’s been like for me watching gold, we’re watching this picture slowly develop. We’re getting to the point where people are going to be able to see the picture, and at that point gold is the answer. It’s not just an asset anymore. It’s the answer to a lot of people’s questions. . .The picture is becoming clearer, and everything the central banks are doing is bringing that day forward a little bit.”

Grant Williams
Vulpes Investment Management
June 2016

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“Rome fell because the dictators ruined the Roman economy and the institutions that had made it prosperous. Rome was falling apart before the barbarian invasions. How did the Caesars do that? They were profligate spenders. As emperors with absolute power usually do, they thought big: infrastructure (roads, temples, palaces), a huge bureaucracy, and, as the key to maintaining their power they had a very large, loyal, and well-paid army. As a consequence, massive government spending far outstripped revenue. They had what today we call a deficit problem.”

Jeffrey Harding
Mises Institute

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“My studies of the 17 major financial crises since the founding of the Republic reveal that over-optimism is an important driver of the bubbles that eventually become busts. As the legendary investor, Sir John Templeton, once said, ‘The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘This time is different.’ Such was the mind-set that real estate prices could only rise (2008), dot-com companies would forever grow and be profitable (2001), or that the Russian government would never default (1998). “

Robert F. Bruner
The Hill

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“The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people. They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them. Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.”

Pearl S. Buck
Novelist who was in Germany during the hyperinflation in 1923

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“[T]he object of speculation may vary widely from one mania or bubble to the next. It may involve primary products, especially those imported from afar (where the exact conditions of supply and demand are not known in detail), or goods manufactured for export to distant markets, domestic and foreign securities of various kinds, contracts to buy or sell goods or securities, land in the country or city, houses, office buildings, shopping centers, condominiums, foreign exchange. At a late stage, speculation tends to detach itself from really valuable objects and turn to delusive ones. A larger and larger group of people seeks to become rich without a real understanding of the processes involved. Not surprisingly, swindlers and catchpenny schemes flourish.”

Robert Z. Aliber and Charles P. Kindleberger
Manias, Panics and CrashesAnatomy of a Typical Financial Crisis (2001)

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“It’s an extraordinary moment; we have our first pandemic in 100 years. We have our first invasion in Europe in 75 years. And we have our first inflation around the world in 40 years. When you look at the combination, the intersection of the pandemic, of the war, of the inflation, it signals paradigm shift, the end of 15 years of financial repression and the next era to come.” – Ted Pick, Morgan Stanley, co-President at CNBC

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Notable Quotable

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“A post-dollar world is coming.”
Ruchir Sharma, Rockfeller International
(Financial Times editorial)

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“Cash over the long run is the worst-performing asset class and therefore the riskiest asset class. So where do you go? To me, going to any one asset increases risk. So the best way to deal with the challenging environment I foresee is by diversifying well. . . [G]old is just an alternative currency to fiat paper currencies. If your portfolio is likely to perform poorly in the adverse environment I’ve been describing – less effective monetary policy, the need to run larger fiscal deficits and monetize them, and challenging politics – the behavior of gold as alternative cash has some diversifying merit.”

Ray Dalio
Bridgewater Associates

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