Forever blowing bubbles

This morning the price of gold broke the £4,000/oz level. Even the Beeb news has had charts this week showing the exponential rise in bullion prices. I don’t think they were so upfront in drawing the main lesson that the accelerating rise in price over the last few years teaches: that it indicates the abandonment of confidence in the world financial system, which is built on escalating debt and rapidly depleting trust.

Despite chronic price fixing (whose failure is now contributing to the rapid rise) gold prices pretty much track, inversely, the value of money, simply because it is a commodity whose value is almost entirely as an unchanging token of wealth, rather than (like silver) a major industrial metal as well. So the tripling of the price since 2021 broadly corresponds to an equivalent drop in the buying power of pounds or dollars, due to printing money to fund profligate borrowing, both national and personal. The steady devaluation is well-concealed – partly under piles of green energy tariffs and increased taxes. But it is certainly felt by ordinary people.

I mention all this because self-evidently an exponential curve can’t go on forever, and so it won’t. The whole monetary system is a bubble waiting to burst, and is only maintained by the sleight of hand of central banks and the obscuring of the truth by politicians seeking to avoid panic and the triggering of the inevitable financial tsunami before they can retire on their ill-gotten gains.

One analyst I heard believes the collapse has already started, based on some sign of failure from a provincial US bank, and that the dam will burst in March. So I’d suggest to readers that they keep a couple of week’s supply of cash in a sock. And I’d definitely minimise the amount kept in any cash accounts, because unlike 2008, the banks will probably not be bailed out, but will bail in your money and go bust anyway.

However, this column isn’t intended either as financial advice or as doom mongering (though we’re all doomed, DOOMED, I tell you – now is the time to lay up treasure in heaven, where moth and rust and bursting bubbles do not corrupt). Instead I noted, in the BBC report, that the blame was put characteristically on President Trump, whose unpredictable foreign policy, we were told, is destabilising confidence in the sound and established order.

This I believe to be tosh, as I started listening to predictions of the current situation back in 2021, when Joe Biden ruled the world and Putin’s single-handed destruction of the global oil trade was a year in the future. Once again, in my view, we see the scapegoating of “non-progressive” leaders (Trump, Putin, Ji, Netanyahu) by our propaganda machine, to cover up the widening fault-lines in the globalist project.

It’s no doubt true that US tariffs and the rest have accelerated what was already happening to the monetary system. But some wise analysts see this as part of Trump’s entire political strategy of using unpredictability to wrong-foot the powerful globalist forces ranged against him, which we have seen all too clearly at work, especially since the lockstep COVID phenomenon of 2020. These commentators say that Trump’s raw use of US power is not irrational or even novel, but is a deliberate de-obfuscation of the nationally self-interested way the whole world has been acting, but which for public consumption it has glossed with fake morality. Trump, they say, is openly putting American interests first, but unlike his predecessors is acknowledging the right of other nations to do the same as long as it benefits their people and doesn’t damage his own country. His detractors, by contrast, shout loudly about inclusiveness, sustainability, equality and stakeholders, whilst not even lining their citizen’s pockets, but their own.

When I peer behind the sound and fury to the actual results of Trump’s geopolitics, then I’m inclined to agree. Whereas America (and its lap-dog Britain) stormed into Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and a whole bunch more with the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, and the strengthening of Islamism, civilians have rejoiced in the streets of Venezuela at the surgical removal of Maduro, and in the streets of Iran at his promise of protection. Illegal immigration to the US has been solved at a stroke, and the juggernaut of net zero stopped in its tracks, to the benefit of the economy and ordinary workers.

And so, as I consider the failing money system, I am inclined to believe that the Trump team is very well aware of the implications of the impending explosion, and rather than retiring to an island refuge are seeking to mitigate it. Even precipitating the inevitable at this stage might be preferable to allowing the debt mountain to double its trillions and collapse anyway, though I make no claim to understanding such complexities. I note that people like Putin and Ji have also been protecting their nations from the coming financial storm by seeking to establish gold-based currencies of real money, rather than just “funny papers” (to quote McCartney).

I’m not hero-worshipping Trump, still less Putin or Netanyahu, but a wealth of evidence convinces me they’re closer to the biblical purposes of magistracy – to protect their people and punish evildoers with the sword – than the Mafiosi assembling at Davos or the UN. At the very least, I can see some method behind the madness.

But it appears that neither the BBC nor many of my fellow-believers see past the “Mad Dictator” trope – the latter probably because they only listen to the former. “How do we pray about Putin?” Someone asked me, meaning essentially, “Is it OK for to pray that the ground opens and he goes down alive to eternal torment?”

Someone else immediately replied, “Yes, and what about Trump?”

My best reply off the cuff was to remind them that God appointed both Sennacherib the Assyrian, and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, as rulers who would judge Israel and Judah, respectively, by the sword. Indeed, the prophet Daniel addressed the latter with great respect as the divinely-appointed king, and it even appears that, after a period of chastisement, Nebuchadnezzar may have been converted to the God of Israel. Paul tells us to pray for the Emperor’s well-being – the Caesar at the time probably being Nero. Proverbs tells us that “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord. He directs it like a stream of water anywhere he pleases.”

In summary, geopolitics is a complicated old game involving complex individuals with complex problems that most of us never have to face. Willingly or unwillingly they all serve God’s salvific purposes in history. It seems to me, therefore, that it behoves Christians at least to look for truth beyond the biased headlines.

I suppose that even applies to Keir Starmer… but Providence has given me a vote in that regard.