"Screaming Fundamentals" You Must Own Gold And Silver Now

This report lays out an investment thesis for gold and one for silver. Various factors lead me to conclude that gold is one investment that you can park for the next ten or twenty years, confident that it will perform well. My timing and logic for both entering and finally exiting gold (and silver) as investments are laid out in the full report.

The punch line is this: Gold and silver are not (yet) in bubble territory, and large gains remain, especially if monetary, fiscal, and fundamental supply-and-demand trends remain in play.

Introduction

In 2001, as the painful end of the long stock bull market finally seeped into my consciousness, I began to grow quite concerned about my traditional stock and bond holdings. Other than a house with 27 years left on a 30 year mortgage, these holdings represented 100% of my investing portfolio. So I dug into the economic data to see what I could discover. What I found shocked me. It's all in the Crash Course in both video and book form, so I won't go into that data here.

By 2002, I had investigated enough about our monetary, economic, and political systems that I decided that holding gold and silver would be a very good idea, poured 50% of my liquid net worth into precious metals, and sat back and watched.

Since then, my appreciation for and understanding of the role of gold as a monetary asset and silver as an indispensable industrial metal have deepened considerably.

Investing in gold and silver is still a good idea. Here's why.

Why own gold and silver?

The reasons to hold gold and silver, and I mean physical gold and silver, are pretty straightforward. So let’s begin with the primary reasons to own gold.

1. To protect against monetary recklessness
2. As insulation against fiscal foolishness
3. As insurance against the possibility of a major calamity in the banking/financial system
4. For the embedded 'option value' that will pay out if and when gold is remonetized

By ‘monetary recklessness,’ I mean the creation of money out of thin air and the application of more liquidity than the productive economy actually needs. The central banks of the world have been doing this for decades, not just since the onset of the great financial crisis. In gold terms, the supply of above-ground gold is growing at roughly 3% per year, while money supply has been growing at nearly three times that yearly rate since 1980.

Now this is admittedly an unfair view, because the economy has been growing, too, but money and credit growth have handily outpaced even the upwardly distorted GDP measurements by a wide margin. As the economy stagnates under this too-large debt load while the credit system continues to operate as if perpetual expansion were possible, look for all the resulting extra dollars to show up in prices of goods and services.

Real interest rates are deeply negative (meaning that the rate of inflation is higher than Treasury bond yields). This is a forced, manipulated outcome courtesy of central banks that are buying bonds with thin-air money. Historically, periods of negative real interest rates are nearly always associated with outsized returns for commodities, especially precious metals. If and when real interest rates turn positive, I will reconsider my holdings in gold and silver, but not until then. That is as close to an absolute requirement as I have in this business. (more)