printAmerican cable commentariat is dominated by horrible bimbos, sporting big hair, overbites, and grating voices that sound as though they’ve been squeezed from the other end of the woman’s anatomy (to use a Greg-Gutfeld analogy I’ve refined). That’s the ubiquitous TV tart’s better angle. Even when these females are kind-of on the right side of the issues, they are boring, second-handers, who spout mind-numbing banalities with great confidence. (I don’t know how a husband or boyfriend puts up with That “Creaky Voice.”)
Unlike the practically unknown Dominic Frisby, the teletart’s assets are not between her ears.
Introduced to American audiences by RT’s Max Keiser, Frisby is “resident gold bug at Moneyweek,” and author of the essay, “Why Gold Is The Currency Of The Free.”
Why can’t cable hosts be more like Max Keiser? Notwithstanding his program’s many idiosyncrasies—lefty nooks and crannies and conspiracy theories—RT’s Keiser Report always introduces its viewers to highly intelligent, often original, individuals who have a great deal to impart and add.
Twenty five minutes (and 49 seconds) into the latest broadcast, Frisby dealt an analytical blow to Warren Buffet’s claim that “gold is worthless as it pays no interest.” Since RT provides no transcript, I quote here from Frisby’s online column, “Gold pays no interest, has no use and no fundamental value – really?”:
“…gold pays no interest. True. But then, nor does cash – unless you lend it to people. The world needs to realise that by putting cash in the bank you are lending it. Gold can pay interest – if you lend it out. And lots of people do (though for what purpose I cannot say). But in this environment of negative real rates (when the central bank rate of interest is below the rate of inflation), who gives a hoot about interest anyway? 1 or 2% interest. Whoopee-do.”
[SNIP]
Exactly. You lose money by keeping cash. Anyone with some savings knows that you might as well not have them, if you are after the yield on your savings.
…Next, there’s this idea that “gold has no use”. Really?
Gold has very little industrial application, yes. It’s too expensive. But no use? Gold, unlike bubbles and government bonds, lasts forever. This makes it a highly effective form of money, as I’m about to explain.
But how can gold be money, runs the next argument, when you can’t go into a shop and buy stuff with it? Absolutely. You can’t.
Err … actually, you can. The gold sovereign is still legal tender. But it only has a face value of one pound, when it’s worth over £250. You’d be a plum if demanded that some poor shopkeeper accept it as payment. (And he’d be a plum if he refused it). But I’m splitting hairs.
As a day-to-day medium of exchange, gold has never found much use. A piece of gold the size of a penny (about £125 or $200 in today’s money) contains too much value for anything other than expensive transactions. Copper, nickel, silver, paper and now digital money have all found far more prolific use.
But to assert that you can’t buy stuff with it therefore it isn’t money, is a facile and ignorant argument. Money is more than just a medium of exchange. Indeed, this is just one of the three essential functions of money: it also has to act as a store of wealth and as a unit of account.
It is gold’s very inert, intrinsic, eternal uselessness – and we have Mother Nature to thank for that – that makes it such an effective form of money. It has no other function other than to be a store of wealth. Even its use in jewellery is an extension of that function – to store (and display) wealth.
Governments can’t print gold, they can’t ‘quantitatively ease’ it, they can’t loan it into existence. They can’t debase it the way they do their own currencies. It just stays there, unconsumed, forever. Which all means that gold is constant – and therefore an excellent unit of account, far better than government money.
Max Keiser stepped in to correct the record about Buffoon Buffest’s stock, which has been down 90% versus gold over the past 10 year.