The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

Gold is hot in the financial news these days. But why? What does it mean? Where will the trends go? No one knows for sure, but this speech given to the Gold Investing conference held in Geneva on May 18th, 2006 sheds some light on the issue.

"Among the Anglo-Saxons, there is a school of thought called the "Whig view of history," which sees the course of events as an unrolling tapestry on which is woven a record of a steady, ineluctable progression from barbarity to civilization.

Yet, ironically, the Whigs' own supremacy — mostly enjoyed during Britain's years of commercial and military triumph in the 18th century — was underwritten by a system of rapidly expanding government debt, deviously and often corruptly financed through the offices of the fledgling Bank of England.

As a result, the period was not unblemished by periods of wild, speculative excess and interposed monetary panic, the most spectacular instances of which were the two, partly interrelated schemes whose respective Mississippi and South Sea Companies served to give us the word "bubble" itself.

No one who reads the accounts of those roistering times can fail to be entertained by the tale of human folly they contain, though not without a rueful reflection that they also prove the Whigs were hopelessly optimistic in their perception of man's relentless self-betterment.

For, indeed, our own experiences of just the past decade show that, if we follow a recipe that mixes the eternal human failing of avarice with the oft-recurring mass delusion that one lives in a "New Era," and which allows the kitchen to be supervised by sharp-minded financiers, it will produce just as explosive a cocktail today as it did nearly three centuries ago.

But there is a more enduring lesson to be had from such events, beyond the satisfaction of deriving a suitably uplifting moral from such a juicy tale of scandal and excess.

Shortly after the excitement of the two bubbles had passed, a much more momentous and enduring change began to unfold."

The long story short? Gold is your friend. It can help you maintain your wealth against inflation.