Gold Should Be Money

Keeping up with the news is hard, and we have decided to share reading notes of articles we think can be interesting to our clients, or more broadly to anyone thinking about preserving wealth, or wealth resilience.

Gold bugs, as precious metals enthusiasts are sometimes referred to, are notoriously hard on currencies, like the US dollar and would generally argue they're not money. Bill Bonner elaborates on the topic in his diary on Rogue Economics, saying "It’s an unfortunate historical anomaly that people think about the paper in their wallets as money. The dollar is, technically, a currency. A currency is a government substitute for money. But gold is money.". He quotes Aristotle's characteristics of good money:

• Durable

• Divisible

• Consistent

• Convenient

• Intrinsically valuable

Finally, he believes Aristotle should have mentioned that good money cannot "be created out of thin air". Obviously, gold truly is money in his mind.

We at Global Precious Metals provide our clients ways to preserve wealth outside of the financial system, but that is not to say we share Bill Bonner's evident aversion to said system or to G10 Currencies. Positioning for the doom of the financial system is, hopefully, wildy overstating the likelihood of a remote scenario. That is not to say we don't keep a watchfull eye on the current and forward-looking financial environment for our individual portfolios, but holding precious metals, and physical gold specifically, might prove useful in the event of a rocky market period or two.