Gold And The Shrinking Trust Horizon

Via John Rubino’s Substack,

Last week I posted an article on the implosion of the official vaccine narrative.

That’s a controversial topic so not surprisingly it generated some heat on both sides. And a few readers expressed the wish that I’d stay in my lane (precious metals investing) and avoid venturing into unrelated and less well understood territory.

But believe it or not, the public health establishment losing its credibility is related to precious metals, via something called the trust horizon. It works like this: When things are good and the people in charge of big systems seem to be running them well, we’re content to trust the experts. We keep most of our money in banks, brokerage houses, and crypto wallets that exist for us only as websites. We buy produce that’s grown in a different hemisphere and shipped via boats, trains, and trucks to corporate chain grocery stores. We vaccinate ourselves and our kids according to the schedules set by the NIH or the CDC. We pop pills on our doctor’s orders without doing any research. We eat processed foods on the assumption that the FDA keeps them free of dangerous additives. And we believe what we see on cable news.

In other words, our trust horizon, defined as the distance from ourselves at which we’ll believe what we’re told, is global. We assume everything everywhere is working for our benefit and we’re thus willing to put our welfare in those distant hands.

But let some big systems fail to take proper care of us and we pull back, finding people and institutions closer to home that we can see and judge first-hand. We move our money out of distant banks and brokers and into local credit unions whose managers live down the street. We start buying groceries from farmers markets or directly from local farmers. Instead of popping whatever pill is standard for our ailments we look into “food as medicine” and other lifestyle remedies like exercise, supplements, and meditation. We homeschool our kids and join gun clubs. We buy homesteads and start raising chickens.

So where are today’s Americans on the trust horizon spectrum? Well, the military industrial complex is starting (potentially nuclear) wars all over the place. Government debt is growing exponentially. Wall Street has turned the markets into one big casino. Universities have become (very expensive) insane asylums. Congress is full of insider traders who amass fortunes while “serving the public.” And our presidents, well, insert your sarcastic phrase here.

It’s safe to say that for a growing number of disillusioned people, trust now extends to – maybe — the governor’s mansion, city hall, local farmers, their church and one or two community banks. And that’s about it.

Where does gold come in?

The biggest of the big systems that the experts have failed to manage is money. If we can’t trust the monetary authorities to maintain the value of the dollar (and in the past year we’ve learned that we emphatically cannot) then we need other forms of money to trust. And that would be gold and silver, the forms of money that disillusioned people have been running to since literally before the Roman Empire.

The advantage of precious metals lies with the concept of “counterparty risk.” Fiat currencies and pretty much everything else in today’s world require someone (the counterparty) to keep a promise for the thing in question to perform as advertised.

For your dollars to hold their value, the Fed must keep the money supply under control. For your bank account to work your bank has to stay solvent. Likewise your brokerage house. But gold and silver have no counterparty risk. No one must keep a promise for them to stay valuable. They are what they are, regardless of the behavior of the world’s experts. That’s why those experts hate precious metals and why regular people rediscover them every few generations.

Looked at this way, you can draw a direct line from the vaccine mess to gold and silver coins and bars stored in a safe place. And the line is getting thicker and stronger with every new scandal.

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