Editor’s Note: This article by Joshua Glawson from FEE, cross-posted with permission, was NOT written as a a “promoted post.” We are labeling it as such simply because we benefit when people take advantage of the advice Glawson offers by rolling over their retirement accounts into a self-direct IRA backed by physical precious metals through our partners at Genesis. Here’s Glawson’s article…
Governments recklessly erode citizens’ wealth, but there are ways to avoid being a victim of this scheme.
Because gold is honest money it is disliked by dishonest men.” – Ron Paul
Buying physical gold is a time-proven method of securing generational wealth, and a security measure often taken in times of economic turbulence. Gold investing has long been viewed as a hedge against inflation and a store of value against currencies. Throughout history, as coins and currency became debased, those who had more precious metals on-hand had many more options for purchasing what was needed and investing.
Investing in a gold currency, as economist F.A. Hayek suggested, also acts as competition to paper currency and any attempted coercive monopoly of currencies. When currencies are strictly controlled, the power of government is buttressed. Hayek specified, “[Monopoly of currency] has of course become a chief instrument for prevailing governmental policies and profoundly assisted the general growth of governmental power.”
According to Investopedia, currency debasement is intentionally lowering the currency’s value through various monetary and fiscal methods. In the past, debasement was associated with substituting precious metals with base metals such as using less gold or silver in the coins and replacing it with copper or nickel, while keeping the face value the same. Today, debasement primarily occurs by printing more money in the form of fiat currency, a process known as monetary inflation.
The reason governments typically initiate currency debasement is to extend government spending and purchasing power. Still, it comes at the expense of citizens who are eventually stuck with less wealth, higher costs, and lowered purchasing power. Currency debasement, as well as monetary inflation in general, tends toward price inflation. Simply put, currency debasement in the form of monetary inflation is legalized counterfeit.
Since the US began removing itself from the gold standard in 1933—and eventually removing that gold backing altogether in 1971—the value of the dollar has fallen significantly when compared to an ounce of gold. As of 2023, the value of US currency is being challenged as the dollar is slowly debased. The purchasing power of a dollar in 1913 would be worth around $30.22; a dollar in 1933 would be worth around $23; a dollar in 1970 would be worth $7.71; and, a dollar in 2003 would be worth $1.63.
How Does Gold Hedge Against Inflation?
Gold is a commodity valued and traded internationally. Gold is valued for many reasons including its aesthetic appreciation, limited supply, durability, imperishability, popularity, and industrial uses. Due to these reasons and more, gold has maintained its overall value throughout the millennia. When one country’s currency begins to slip or falter, gold is likely the best-shared commodity to transfer wealth between currencies of other countries while maintaining a greater appeal for investment. Especially so when some countries’ currencies are not accepted everywhere due to political conflict or discrepancies.
By measuring the rate of inflation, InflationTool demonstrates that from 1971 to 2023, the average inflation rate for the US dollar has been 3.93%, while the cumulative inflation rate has been a whopping 641.44%. In layperson’s terms, this means $100 in 1971 is now equivalent to$741.44, which represents a significant decrease in purchasing power.
As George Mason University professor of economics Lawrence White, states, “The inflation rate was only 0.1 percent over Britain’s 93 years on the classical gold standard. It was only 0.01 percent in the United States between gold resumption in 1879 and 1913.” Yet, because of failures of monetary policies by the Federal Reserve, and fiscal policies by Congress, the inflation rate today is much higher pushing above 6 percent with an average inflation rate from 1960 to 2023 averaging close to 5 percent.
Is Gold Volatile?
Some economists, especially those with socialist and centralized planning tendencies, will suggest that gold prices are volatile. Their statements misrepresent gold as though the ‘volatility’ means gold is not as price sustainable as the dollar. Contrary to their sentiments, the price of gold is only considered volatile when compared to a currency such as the US dollar in relatively short terms. When gold is looked at through a lens of global values throughout the course of history, beyond a single currency, we see that it has maintained significant value, and when currencies fail it is gold that has helped people regain wealth. Comparing the global value of gold to the dollar, we see that the value of gold has remained intact overall.
In the US, gold in 1913 was $20.67; in 1933, it was around $32.32; in 1970, it was $38.90; in 2003 it was $417.25; and today, it is around $1800. According to Statista, from 1971 to 2022, gold had a return of 7.78 percent per year in USD terms.
Although the US government has continued to artificially fix, change, and influence the price of gold, the value of gold has remained superior to the dollar overall. This further indicates that gold is still a good hedge against inflation. Gold has outpaced inflation in the US in the long term, indicating that gold is not as volatile as the dollar in the long term.
Can Investing in Gold Improve the Dollar?
The fiat dollar of the US is what allows politicians, in conjunction with the Treasury and Federal Reserve, to arbitrarily print more dollars in order to fund nearly-endless wars, inflated welfare programs, and to deliver uncapped foreign aid. More printing of dollars tends to decrease the value of the other dollars in circulation, and this can lead to price inflation. Fiat simultaneously acts as a form of indirect slavery and secondhand theft once those dollars are spent, the same way counterfeiting does. If the dollar does not return to a gold standard to create a natural market-agreed value of the dollar with a more restricted supply, the dollar will likely continue to weaken as the incentives for these government programs and handouts are greater than the immediately perceived costs.
Even if the dollar does not return to a gold standard, having a significantly increasing number of people investing heavily in gold as opposed to treasury bonds, money market accounts, CDs, stocks, and the like, creates shifts in the incentives encouraging and pressuring other people to join in on the more sound investment of gold. The market sees the long-term stability and gains of those that do invest in gold, and people naturally tend to want to have the best return on investment. Gold is not a cure-all for inflation and deflation, rather it is a more stable long-term option than fiat.
Investing in gold and currencies that hold their value creates a challenge for the government’s monopoly over currency and its exploitation of that monopoly. Or, as Hayek said, “Just as the absence of competition has prevented the monopolist supplier of money from being subject to a salutary discipline, the power over money has also relieved governments of the necessity to keep their expenditure within their revenue.”
This article by Joshua Glawson was cross-posted with permission from FEE. You can roll over your retirement accounts into a self-direct IRA backed by physical precious metals through our partners at Genesis.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
