Gold price is up:

It’s the highest it’s been since the panic-spike in 2011-2013, both in EUR and USD. However, if we remove that spike from the graph and see what it looks like then, we can see something else. I’ll show you another graph, this time in USD, to make it clearer:

Let’s get some painfully obvious things out of the way. First, this is not the price of gold. It’s the value of paper currency over time, measured in gold. Some people have calculated that gold and silver can be used as a very steady marker of value from Roman times up until today, measured in things like a good suit, lunch or a goat. So, essentially, if a good suit cost you the same amount of gold in ancient Rome as it does now, it’s not gold that’s getting more expensive over time, as the graph seems to indicate. The graph shows inflation.

Another obvious thing on the graph is that paper currency doesn’t just fluctuate randomly. There are patterns: times where it keeps steady value, and inflatory spikes. Unfortunately, the graph doesn’t show the Nixon shock in 1971, where “the dollar plunged by a third during the 1970s”, or the “Executive Order 6102” from 1933, which “made gold clauses unenforceable, and changed the value of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, thereby devaluing the U.S. dollar”, to quote Wikipedia.

The third obvious thing is that we are on top of a very nasty-looking inflation trend, and although one would naturally attribute that to the financial crisis of 2007-08, it appears to have started some years before that, and it’s possible that the crisis was a consequence of inflation, not the other way around. You see, the crisis was triggered by sub-prime mortgage loans market collapse, but what if the root cause was in the reduced purchasing ability of the homeowners due to inflation, triggering defaults? This is an interesting thesis that would require some deep data mining to prove or disprove.

Now we are getting into the realm of the non-obvious. Something seems to have happened around 2002 that gradually reduced the purchasing power of the populace in real terms. There are many candidates: globalization and outsourcing, printing money to finance wars, but the date itself is indicative of 9/11. Whether the event itself triggered other events that were harmful, or it was used as an excuse to implement harmful things that were being prepared in advance, that I can’t tell, because it’s probably a combination of both. However, the graph indicates that the purchasing power of EUR and USD measured in gold are continually falling on a steep curve, and my hunch says we are approaching a hyperinflatory phase of a complete economic collapse.

Let me show you another graph, of Bitcoin price over time:

My interpretation is that the post-9/11 restrictions on the financial markets and all kinds of Fascist policies with newspeak names had the result of people hysterically trying to rescue their money and the so-called crypto-currencies appeared as an alternative to the banking system, SWIFT and the credit card mafia. Bitcoin price is not a great indicator because it behaves like a high-risk investment paper, and not like a financial safe-haven, but apparently if you want a safe haven against America and the banking system, crypto is not at all bad, if you can get out of it in time, because crypto is a financial version of the Schroedinger’s cat: you can think it has value based on some graph, but you only get to learn what it’s worth when you want to sell it, basically at the point of collapse of the greed-curve.

My general recommendation is that the greatest losses in any financial crisis will be suffered to the investment papers with the highest level of abstraction. Essentially, the farther away from the real thing, the greatest the danger, because bullshit, hype, greed and deception always hide in the high levels of abstraction, which can also be read as “bullshit”. The historic lesson with complex financial packages based on bad mortgage loans should be obvious. In times directly preceding a crisis, bullshit-papers create bubbles and trick investors into buying, but when the panic starts, the value of something is always determined by how much someone is willing to pay you for it, not by what you paid for it, and when a bubble bursts, there are no longer any buyers. At that point, everybody hysterically tries to save money by putting it into safe havens, but by then it’s too late.

Essentially, buy precious metals when everybody buys high-risk, high-reward papers, and when everybody goes crazy because the bubble burst, do nothing. Wait it out, then convert metals into a rational wealth-generation plan. This is essential, because as good gold is as a store of value, it doesn’t actually produce additional value by just sitting there, and you need this generation of profit in order to be able to pay for your expenses. This is what my advice would be if this was just another big bad crisis. However, other indicators show that it’s not just about the monetary system, or the economy. The western civilization itself seems to be in its death throes, and we haven’t seen anything that bad since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.