Speaking of the Denver Mint...

I encourage everyone to visit a US Mint.  The San Francisco mint is closed to the public, but the Denver mint offers guided tours to the public.  Reserving a space is recommended to ensure a slot.

As readers of this and other blogs now understand, central bankers, government monetary officials, academia, the financial industry, and the media are notorious anti-gold advocates.  High commodities prices, especially precious metals, thwart the advocacy of the USDollar as the global reserve currency.  Our whole financial system is USDollar-based, and has been since 1945 from Bretton-Woods.

But other sovereign nations are getting increasingly concerned by the profligate printing of the USDollar, so they are diversifying away from USDollar-denominated assets, selling US Treasuries, and buying gold, for instance.  They deservedly are concerned about a bloated, insolvent country issuing more debt.

But the US government and its cohorts must obfuscate these monetary shenanigans, and they also realize that rising prices in the precious metals sector are the canaries in the coal mine of financial distress.  That's why it's in government's best interests to talk gold and silver down, with complicity from economists, pundits and the media.

Which dovetails back to why I recommend readers visit a US Mint if they can.  Upon first entering the welcoming room in the Denver mint to start the tour are two display cases to your left.  The first one chronicles the history of gold.  The next one chronicles silver.

Anybody see the irony in this?  Presidential administrations, central bankers, US Treasury officials, Ivy League economists, Wall Street financial titans, and the financial press have all minimized, dismissed, trivialized, and even mocked precious metals as an investment class, in their vested interest to maintain the status quo of the USDollar as a reserve currency.  They simultaneously proclaim gold is a "barbaric relic."  Gold bugs are lunatics, etc., as the groupthink goes.

Yet, as clear as day, the first thing that grabs you when you start the tour at the Denver mint, are the display cases on the history of gold and silver.  "Do as I do, not as I say..."

The  Establishment's mandate is protect the veneer of the USDollar as a credible medium of exchange and store of value.  While it is true that USDollars are a medium of exchange, since the US Federal Reserve Bank was created in 1913, the USDollar has been a terrible store of value.  It has lost 90 - 99% of its purchasing power since then, depending on which inflation calculations one uses (the official government CPI statistics are notoriously understated).  And that dollar debasing accelerated after 1971 when President Nixon took us off the gold standard, opening the door for central bankers worldwide to recklessly print currency.  Thanks to the ravages of inflation, does anybody still think the cost of healthcare and college tuition has declined over the years?

Former Fed Chairman Greenspan took us to unprecedented heights in debt, and current Fed Chairman Bernanke has subsequently expanded our nation's balance sheet exponentially.  They are trying to solve a huge debt problem by issuing astronomically more debt.  It's insane.  Former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin under President Clinton declared the US would pursue a strong dollar policy.  Please...

That's why the financial industry is expert at creating and hoarding Federal Reserve Notes (e.g. USDollars), and why CPA's are expert at keeping as much of them as they can.  But Federal Reserve Notes are just that:  notes, which is essentially debt.  After all, "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" and backed only by the "full faith and credit of the U.S. government"—the government's ability to levy taxes to pay its debts.

It has no intrinsic value, and is only worth as much as the confidence in the solvency of the issuing sovereign nation.  Due to America's overconsumption and the overexpansion of our debt levels, the world is losing confidence in the USDollar.

Yet, the government doesn't want too many Americans to own gold or silver.  Why?  Because that means you are outside the all-encompassing financial system.  You are no longer depending on them financially--no longer a counterparty.

I will leave the reader to connect the dots.  If this sounds esoteric, and in case I'm being too vague, I will provide one quote:

"Gold is money and nothing else." - JPMorgan, 1912

Note the name--and the date.  Neither are coincidental.