Show Notes
Imagine you are in the circus, watching a tightrope walker who’s been on the sauce. He sways, the crowd gasps, he sways again, more gasps, and yet somehow he doesn’t fall. This goes on and on and eventually you get bored watching. That, it seems to me, is Britain. Public debt is now knocking on £3 trillion. (Remember you could have spent a million pounds every day since Jesus was born and still not have spent a trillion - that’s how incomprehensible a sum a trillion is). Interest payments now run at over £110 billion a year - more than we spend on education. Debt-to-GDP hovers around 100%. Growth is wilted. Productivity is like blancmange. Taxes are everywhere and record-breaking. Waste and bloat and bureaucracy are rampant. But the political response to every problem is the same: spend more. Despite all of this, like our inebriated tight rope walker, sterling refuses to drop. The pound trades around $1.35. The gilt market continues to function. The bond vigilantes, whoever these mystical people are, appear to be away at lunch with Lord Lucan.. Why? The answer begins with a simple but often overlooked fact that currencies are not valued absolutely, but relatively. You look at Britain’s fiscal position and conclude the pound must fall, but against what? It’s not like the US isn’t running unthinkable deficits. Interest payments are exploding there too. The eurozone is if anything more trapped in low growth than we are. Japan’s debt burden is legendary. Never mind the oil, Canada is a basket case. Australian regulation is doing its best to revive the traditions of the penal colony and China has its own economic and demographic headaches. All currencies are crap Then there are interest rates. Britain still offers relatively attractive yields. Ten-year gilts yield around 5%. That may be painful for the Chancellor, whatever her name is, but it is attractive to those looking for income. Japan, the US and most of Europe offer less. Higher interest rates support the pound. They attract computerised capital from around the world, which buys sterling to get the yield. London remains a financial centre, albeit it one in over-regulated decline. There is still some rule of law and some respect for property rights. The UK is not yet Zimbabwe, Turkey or Venezuela, even if it may feel that way. A country can be badly governed for a surprisingly long time before capital completely loses confidence. However, none of the underlying problems have actually been fixed, nor are they going to be fixed. We are still spending £48,000 per household through the state. You’ll get greater productivity out of a plate of blancmange. Taxes are not coming down. We are locked in promise, spend, borrow, tax, repeat. Here’s another possibility. The tightrope walker may never fall off. But with each step, the tightrope itself gets closer to the ground. The pound has lost over 40% of its purchasing power just since 2020. In 2007 a pound cost $2.10, so we are down a third against another unit which in itself is hopeless. Measured against the constant that is gold, the pound has fallen over 95% since the Gordon Brown sales of 1999. Here are those declines visualised. The framing is all wrong. The collapse is not sudden but ongoing. Maybe we don’t get a dramatic crisis. No Black Wednesday, no run on the pound, no emergency press conference outside the Bank of England or wheelbarrows full of digital bank notes. Just more of this relentless decline. Every year a bit more debt, a bit more printing, a bit more inflation, another 7% loss of purchasing power, a bit more government spending, a bit more taxation, year after year, decade after decade. The tightrope gets lower and lower but nobody notices because we are all looking at the walker. Alf Ramsay was on £4,500 a year. Thomas Tuchel gets £5 million. That didn’t happen over night. It was cumulative, incremental and compounded. The endgame remains debasement Not just in the UK but everywhere. In a democracy where
More from The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more
Something a little different this week. On Monday I gave a talk for UK Finance called Making Sense of It All, about the multiple contradictions at work int he economy: rising bond yields yet equity markets grinding higher, huge investment in AI despite limited profit, and the growing squeeze on the materials needed to build AI infrastructure. (Many thanks to Duncan and Rhiannon for inviting me to speak). I’ve taken the deck and put together an online version - the first time I’ve ever attempted such a thing - I hope you will find it useful. The transcript is available above. Until next time, Dominic If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.
After an extraordinary run which started in 2022 below US$20/oz and ended in January this year at US$122, silver has been working its way downwards. We have had a correction of almost 50%. Today we’re at $58/oz having been as low as $55 in July. We are almost certainly going to go back and retest that low, I would say, and silver is very much in a downtrend. $50 has been a huge line in the sand that goes all the way back to 1980 and for decades silver could not get above that number. Then, late last year, it cut through it like butter. What was resistance becomes support is one of the technical analysts’ guiding mantras, and there is every chance $50 will do just that. However, if there is one thing I have learnt about silver over the years it is that has an unrivalled propensity to let you down, which is I suppose my way of saying it could quite easily go a lot lower. It’s silver after all. However, the fundamentals favour silver. The market remains in deficit. The Silver Institute’s latest World Silver Survey forecasts a 46.3 million ounce deficit in 2026, which would be the sixth consecutive annual deficit. Never mind jewellery and investment demand, silver finds an enormous amount of industrial demand (~60% of annual demand), especially in electronics, because it is such a good conductor of electricity. The sudden increase from solar panel demand a few years back is thought to have triggered the recent run, although manufacturers are reducing the amount of silver used in each panel. Bear markets are a time to build. As an investor, you research the companies you might want to buy - there is no need necessarily to rush out and buy them - start building positions when nobody else wants them, make the purchases on your own terms. There is no need to rush. With that in mind, I am going to tell you about my largest silver position today. I even have an interview with the boss. It was a big winner for readers in the last cycle going from below 30c north of C$3, rising more than 1,000%. With the falls in the silver price it has now come back more than 50%, and I think it is worth taking a look. Its CEO is both young and competent and he is growing the company in an admirable way so that in 3 to 5 years time you are going to see something much bigger.
It’s my pleasure to sit down with with the man who “gold pilled” me back in the day with his book, The Collapse of the Dollar. James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, has spent five decades working in banking, finance and investments, making the case that gold is not an investment or another commodity, but money in its purest form. We discuss why he believes the US can no longer repeat the Volcker rescue of the 1980s, the relationship between sound money and liberty, and why he expects gold eventually to return to the centre of global commerce as technology changes the way money moves. James’ latest book is Money and Liberty and you can find his IEA paper here. This interview was brought to you by The Pure Gold Company If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.
Good Sunday to you, We have a fantastic interview for you today. I sit down with legendary Canadian investor Frank Giustra to discuss gold, government debt and why he believes the world is entering the most dangerous geopolitical period of our lifetime. You can either watch the video or listen as a podcast via Spotify et al.Frank made his fortune in mining and natural resources, before founding Lionsgate Films, the world’s biggest independent film studio. His track record as a businessman and investor is superlative. We discuss why he believes this is no ordinary metals bull market, the accelerating shift by central banks from government debt into physical gold, the risk that another round of quantitative easing could trigger a dollar crisis, and whether gold may ultimately need to be revalued higher, dramaticically higher. We also touch on China, financial repression, critical minerals and why, of everything Frank owns today, gold remains the asset he is most excited about. Money Markets & More is the interview series from Dominic Frisby, exploring money, markets, gold, economics and the ideas shaping the world.🥇 The programme is brought to you by The Pure Gold Company If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.
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