In Jim Cook's Archive

WASHINGTON WIZARDS

I was at the Ocean Reef club in Florida over the weekend to see a magnificent antique auto show, boat show and airplane show.  This wealthy enclave near Key Largo is populated by numerous billionaires.  We were staying with friends and I met a number of new people.  I never proselytize friends to buy silver but the subject came up a time or two.  Most of these wealthy people have turned their money over to a manager.  Silver is not on their radar.  That’s unfortunate because I’m convinced a lot of money invested in stocks and bonds will disappear over the next four years.

I have a collection of antique waterfowl decoys that’s worth a lot of money.  At Ocean Reef I watched a parade of five million dollar Dusenbergs, three million dollar Bentleys and million dollar Cords.  I told my friends that I was worried about our current government’s war on wealth that would shrink the value of collectible cars as well as my collection of old decoys.  Government bureaucrats have it in for the affluent.

Most of these people in Washington have little practical experience outside of politics.  They go to Washington to work for the party, get paid by the government for doing nothing that’s productive and have the hubris to believe they can direct the economy and the country.  These are creatures of modern politics.  They could never sell anything, build a business or create wealth.  Their policies diminish America and destroy wealth.
They get their economic beliefs from the likes of Paul Krugman at the New York Times.   This Keynesian leftist promotes unlimited spending and money creation.  He once encouraged Greenspan to create a housing bubble.  Bernanke, Geithner, Summers – they all see the way out of our economic decline through massive inflating, monetizing debt, raising taxes, and artificially lowering interest rates.  So far they’ve been batting zero.  Unfortunately, their faulty policies have horrid economic consequence. For them it’s inflate or die.  For us it’s going to be both.

The landscape is going to change dramatically if we have runaway inflation.  Most of what passes for wealth today (money and its liquid relatives) are going to go up in smoke.  Wealthy people are going to become much less so.  Make no mistake, the rich can become poor.  It’s happened over and over again during historical episodes of flagrant money creation.

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