The Four Giants: Nvidia, Bitcoin, Dollar, and Gold

“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” —Isaac Newton

In February, we saw something extraordinary—the price of gold was near all-time record highs, and the gold and silver miners were more oversold than ever before in history. There’s never been such a divergence between the price of the metal and the miners. Bitcoin took off after the installation of the Bitcoin ETFs and then gold made another all-time record high on March 1st. When gold started up again, the miners took off like rockets. Gold isn’t in the news, and it isn’t acting like it has anytime in recent history. Usually when interest rates are up and the dollar is strong, gold is weak. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and AI are being hyped up in the media.

What gives? History is in the making! This happens not once in a lifetime, but once in the reign of an empire, over hundreds of years or longer. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see the future with four giants muddling our views. These giants are Nvidia, Bitcoin, Dollar, and Gold. All of them are disjointed and unclear. It’s like the beginning of a great novel, when you’re trying to figure out the complexity of the characters in the context of time, setting, and plot. You can thank propaganda for this, and the madness of crowds and popular delusions. If you get on the shoulders of the wrong giant, you will likely fall off. On the right giant, you will admire spectacular views!

Now is the time to pick your giant. I’m not going to rag on Nvidia or Bitcoin, but I do see problems in the making. They both rely on more and more high-density energy to manufacture, operate, and grow. They also rely on abundant natural resources, and strong global cooperation, in a big way. Investors are blind to the importance of these elements as the future unfolds. Many don’t understand how “store of value” is important for the prosperity of other countries involved in world trade, or how printing money out of thin air, racking up gargantuan debts, and picking fights with the world can railroad their vision of a techno-utopian future. As they say, hubris is a great renewable resource.

Investors are partying hard on the Titanic, with the kraken stirring underneath them. They’re so drunk, they don’t even know! Resource scarcity, the cost of energy, gold as a store of value (also proxy for energy), and world war represent the kraken that’s waking up. This big wakeup call, without a doubt, will have a major impact on the future of human societies. The cost of energy will probably be the biggest surprise when it is freed from the shackles of debt and linked to gold. Weirdly, the debt-backed dollar holds down the cost of energy, but it artificially boosts the value of real estate. The financial system is one big centrally-managed mess, and the banksters are losing control! The U.S. is entering fiscal dominance: a situation where the debt and deficit are so high that monetary policy can no longer control inflation.

I want to tell you a little-known story about how the United States became the most powerful nation in the world, and what it did to get there. It was after WWI (1914 to 1918) and the Roaring Twenties, when everyone you can imagine had gotten into the stock market in 1929. When it crashed spectacularly, the Great Depression took hold. It was the longest and deepest downturn in U.S. history, preceded by a widespread belief in permanent prosperity (follow the link so see a list of quotes). The Great Depression was tough, and in 1932, Americans were tired and hungry. This motivated them to turn their backs on the Republican President Herbert Hoover and embrace a different way forward.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) won by a landslide. He was the first Democrat in 80 years to simultaneously secure an outright majority of the popular vote and the electoral college. On March 4, 1933, FDR was inaugurated. Two days later, he closed the entire U.S. banking system. Then another three days later, he and Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act. Between March and June, Congress passed 15 major bills and 77 laws, which fundamentally changed America’s operating system and set in motion the welfare state. Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court agreed to wipe out more than forty percent of public and private debts.

One month after he took office, he issued Executive Order 6102 requiring all Americans to sell their gold coins, bullion, and certificate holdings to a Federal Reserve bank, branch, or agency, at the official price of $20.67 per troy ounce. There were only four exceptions: each person could keep gold coins or certificates not exceeding $100 in value, industry and arts could keep enough for legitimate and customary use, financial institutions could hold gold in trust for a foreign central bank, and anything approved by the Treasury could be held temporarily by financial institutions. Americans who didn’t comply faced criminal penalties, a $10,000 fine, or 10 years of imprisonment or both.

What happened next was either a very lucky accident or a very clever takeover. In one decade, the U.S. took most of the WORLD’s gold! That’s right, from 1933 to 1943, the U.S. took all of its people’s gold and most of the world’s gold. As they say, he who has the gold makes the rules, and that’s exactly what happened next. In 1944, the U.S. led the world into a new monetary system defined by the Bretton Woods Agreement. Since the U.S. had 70% of the world’s gold reserves, or more, it was decided that the dollar would legally be “as good as gold.” The U.S. would be the keeper of the world’s gold and it would be redeemable by foreign nations at $35 per troy ounce. How did the U.S. get all this gold? War, of course.

America was the primary manufacturer for World War II. According to PBS: War Production, “it provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks and two million army trucks. In four years, American industrial production, already the world’s largest, doubled in size.” Those fighting in the war paid the U.S. with their gold. Why gold? Because the U.S. demanded gold, because gold had been real money forever, and gold was an excellent store of value that trading partners used as their sovereign assets. It’s well-known that gold is the money of the commercial world, that currency (paper promises) is worthless as a standard of value in world trade.

While 1971 was the official declaration of the dollar as fiat, it started with FDR when the democrats swooped into the White House during a time of crisis. What is fiat? According to Merriam-Webster, it is an authoritative or arbitrary order, an authoritative determination. It is a command or act of will that creates something out of nothing. According to the Bible, the world came about by “fiat creation” and this is the power of God. There is nothing real or tangible behind fiat; it is only self-proclaimed authority that gives it value. If the love of money is the root of all of evil (1 Timothy 6:10), who is the guy who overthrows the world’s money with fiat? FDR, who served as President from March 4, 1933 – April 12, 1945, did just that.

The thing that strikes me the most peculiar about FDR’s presidency is he came in during a time of crisis and changed all kinds of laws. Democrats love doing this. Perhaps Hilary Clinton coined the most famous democratic quote: “Never waste a good crisis.” Something similar happened with the Covid19 Pandemic. As of March 4, 2024, President Joe Biden had signed 134 executive orders, 169 presidential memoranda, 563 proclamations, and 114 notices. But FDR did more damage than you think. Not only did he take his people’s and the world’s gold, but he devalued the dollar against gold,  and declared all debt contracts with a gold clause (meaning: to be paid back in gold coin) as null! They would be paid back in dollars instead.

Maybe FDR had logic and good intentions for playing God, for stealing the wealth of gold holders and gold-contract holders. By devaluing the dollar with respect to gold, he thought that he could control inflation, but this interfered with private legal relationships. The dollar value of the debt increased by the amount of the devaluation, and this would have brought on many bankruptcies and raised national debt. So FDR railroaded the law and annulled all gold clauses in private legal contracts. He then devalued the dollar to $35 per ounce of gold. Conservatives didn’t like this, and argued it would eventually lead to a steep decline in U.S. world power. And it did!

There were lawsuits that this was unconstitutional. How could the government alter private legal contracts retroactively? But FDR stacked the supreme court, and it voted in favor of the government. There was but a single dissent by Justice James Clark McReynolds (a gold democrat), who departed from protocol and gave a short speech: “The Constitution as many of us understood it, the instrument that has meant so much to us, is gone….Shame and humiliation are upon us now. Moral and financial chaos may be confidently expected.” This story and these quotes are from a great book, American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle over Gold by Sebastian Edwards. I encourage you to read it, and there’s a free audio version on youtube.com.

You see, if someone is going to declare themselves the world’s god of money, give themselves divine power to change the nature of money from gold to fiat, fabricate fiat out of thin air, force the world to use it, and change all debt contracts to his new fiat, well then, he has to take the world’s “real money” as hostage! And he has to somehow convince the world that he is trustworthy with that real money, even if he has no such intention of honoring the-dollar-is-as-good-as-gold agreement. But some of the world figured out the con—Charles de Gaulle being the most vocal—and the world started exchanging their dollars for gold. By 1971, the U.S. had to stop the dollar-gold exchange, and “temporarily” suspend the Bretton Woods Agreement. Otherwise, it would have lost all its precious metal.

So it was 1933 when the U.S. government first imposed itself in economic affairs as the “protector” of the poor, the unemployed, and the disadvantaged, and in so doing, it became a tyrant, a bully, and a monster. It started down a dangerous path of lying and deceit, to cover up the fact that it was overthrowing real money on the world stage and replacing it with something else that it created out of thin air (fiat, backed only by the full faith and credit of the government). It’s never a good idea to play God. It’s better to trust the natural process of pain. But most people don’t care, as long as they benefit from it and/or avoid pain. When it starts to hurt, people wake up. Gold is making record highs because the rest of the world is waking up right now, and it’s changing the failed monetary system.

Moving the world’s gold-backed currency to fiat was the government creating something out of nothing by divine command or decree. Man has always wanted to be God, and this has been man’s nemesis throughout history. The most famous story is the Tower of Babel. Ancient Babylonia was people deluding themselves into thinking they were godlike. In the story of Lucifer, God’s top angel decided that he wanted to be as God, and he’s still trying! Whenever man presumes to be godlike, in life or in his relationships, he sooner or later figures out that he is not. Only God is God! Only nature is God. Only gold and silver are money. Primarily, gold is money, kept as a sovereign asset. And it’s been this way from the beginning (see the Book of Genesis).

Central banks are loading up on gold. China, Russia, and other BRICS nations are acquiring gold. The world is moving from resource abundance to resource scarcity…from globalism to localism. MMT is wrong—debt matters. Whether our leaders are complicit with this reset, I don’t know. I do know that the majority of people are going to lose in the transition. Me included. We are already in the midst of a world war. It is a financial war, a currency war, an energy war. The world is divided into East and West, NATO and BRICS, and our side is not really fighting for democracy. We are fighting for tyranny, and control. Back to the four giants…AI, gold, dollars, and crypto…the price of energy and everything soars…the welfare state is bankrupt…the grid goes down…which giant’s shoulders? Think on it, and get on board.

 

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