Ken Ivory

While Keynes blamed greedy capitalists and "animal spirits" for the Great Depression, Friedrich Hayek had already explained the real cause in his prescient 1931 work "Prices and Production." The Austrian economist identified artificial credit expansion by central banks as the culprit—not market failure, but government intervention in money markets. Hayek's analysis cut through the political noise with surgical precision. When central banks create money out of thin air and push interest rates below their natural market level, they distort the entire structure of production. Entrepreneurs receive false price signals, leading them to start long-term investment projects that appear profitable but lack real consumer demand. The economy develops what Austrians call "malinvestment"—resources flow into the wrong sectors, creating an unsustainable boom. The Federal Reserve had done exactly this throughout the 1920s, expanding credit by roughly 60% between 1921 and 1929. Easy money fueled the stock market bubble and encouraged massive overinvestment in capital goods industries. When reality finally struck and the artificial boom collapsed, politicians and mainstream economists blamed capitalism itself. They demanded more government intervention to "fix" the crisis that government intervention had created in the first place. Hayek's theory predicted both the boom and the inevitable bust with mathematical precision, while Keynes scrambled to construct his interventionist narrative after the fact. The Austrian explanation required no complex equations or assumptions about market irrationality—just basic economic logic about how price distortions create systemic imbalances. Today's economists still worship at the altar of Keynesian demand management, ignoring the Austrian insights that actually explained 1929. They learned nothing from Hayek's analysis and continue repeating the same credit expansion mistakes that created every major financial crisis since.

“The Republicans will fix it this time” “The Democrats will fix it this time”

The gold standard worked because it made every government deficit a direct assault on the nation's money supply—and markets punished politicians immediately for their fiscal recklessness. Under gold, when Congress spent beyond tax revenues, the Treasury had to borrow real money from real savers. No magical money printing. No Federal Reserve buying government bonds with newly created dollars. Politicians faced the same constraint as every household: you can only spend what someone else saved first. And foreign creditors could demand gold redemption at any time, creating an automatic brake on inflationary spending. The mechanics were beautifully simple. Britain's pound sterling maintained its gold parity for over 200 years because the Bank of England raised interest rates whenever gold flowed out of the country. Higher rates attracted foreign capital and made domestic credit scarce—forcing the government and private borrowers to compete for the same limited pool of savings. Deficit spending meant crowding out private investment, and voters saw the immediate consequences in higher borrowing costs. You can see this discipline in action during the Panic of 1893. Cleveland's administration faced massive gold outflows as investors lost confidence in America's fiscal position. Instead of printing money, Cleveland arranged private gold purchases from J.P. Morgan and European bankers—paying market rates for the privilege. The federal budget had to balance because the alternative was national bankruptcy and gold standard abandonment. Modern economists call this "barbarous" because it prevented their beloved countercyclical spending. Damn right it did. Politicians couldn't promise infinite benefits funded by invisible taxes on savers. Every war, every welfare program, every government expansion required convincing actual people to lend their actual savings.

They did this - to do the thing - that all the Gold critics - say only the US dollar can do. Gold’s use case as a reserve asset has just been unequivocally proven. Thank you Turkey. See you in the Summer.

Central banks bought 312 tonnes of gold in Q1 2026. That's not portfolio rebalancing. That's a sprint. Here's who's buying and why it matters.

Singapore is planning to expand its gold storage capacity, positioning itself as a key custodian of bullion for foreign central banks. It’s also developing “gold-related capital market products to promote price discovery and build liquidity” Big news…

In this video, Margaret Thatcher explains that a country’s wealth doesn’t come from natural resources, but from policies that encourage creativity, initiative, and enterprise.