Cut Off Your Tail to Save My Face

The good Professor reprints his introduction to Ferdinand Lips’ book “Gold Wars”. I find this to be one of his more memorable insights into the gold standard and its present status in the world monetary system:

“. . . governments have, correctly, identified gold as the only antidote in the hands of the individual against their effors to build the Tower of Babel of irredeemable debt . . . According to the Bible man had become so conceited as to challenge God by proposing to build a tower that was to reach to High Heaven. God’s punishment for the temerity was to confuse the tongues of nations . . The Biblical story may be interpreted allegorically as an admonition not to challenge God by attempting to build a tower of irredeemable debt that is to reach to High Heaven . . . Currencies of nations have been confused. The tower can never be completed for lack of compatibility among various means of payment.”

The remainder of this piece is a discussion of the Basis, which will be the subject of the Fifth — but hopefully not – Last Session of Gold Standard University Live in Canberra, Australia from November 11-14, 2008. The title of the session is “Primer on the Gold Basis”, which of course is right up my alley (actually, some of the past GSUL attendees can probably teach such a Primer better than I can at this point since my head is buried deep in the details!)

If I knew that some of you are rearing to go, and specifically would like to hear me speak about the basis at an advanced level, that would help me resolve to cancel my other personal and business commitments so that I can make it to this very special, once-in-a-lifetime event. I’ll try to put together a preliminary course outline over the next few days to share with you, but in the meantime please e-mail me with your thoughts and interest. By the way, the basis could very well be the most important signal to watch in the silver and gold markets during the next few weeks and months, so this is all very timely.

Tom Szabo

Silveraxis.com

Tom Szabo was born in Hungary during the Communist era and escaped to the West with his family, eventually settling in California. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, he spent 8 years as a financial statement auditor with Deloitte & Touche, focusing on financial institutions. He has co-founded several precious metal related businesses and investment funds, invests for his own account and runs the website at www.silveraxis.com. His specialty is original, controversial, unpopular and contrarian thinking.