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Perspective Over the weekend, bombs started falling on Iran. The U.S. and Israel commenced with Operation Epic Fury. Within a day, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, was killed… along with forty of the regime’s top leaders. Gold and silver prices moved a bit higher on the news of the hostilities. After all, it is only natural to see a flight to precious metals as a safe haven whenever we see geopolitical crises. But I want to mention two things here… First, the move higher in gold was much less than I believe most people expected. By mid-afternoon this past Monday, less than two days after the first shots were fired, gold was only trading at a $23 premium to last Friday’s close. Second, I think it is a bad idea to chase gold prices higher when war breaks out. Invariably, the price reverts to the norm. We saw this after the planes were flown into the World Trade Center. We saw this just a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. We saw this again shortly after the war between Israel and Hamas erupted. Chasing a war premium is simply risky business. Stay Focused For instance… Watching for strength or weakness in the U.S. dollar is a much better activity than trying to capture a war premium. If the U.S. dollar is weak and weakening – like it is right now – that is a much better reason to own gold than bombs landing in Tehran. Keeping an eye on the Dow / Gold Ratio (DGR) is a much better activity than trying to capture a war premium. Until it takes five or less ounces of gold to buy every stock on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), we would expect gold prices to rise. That is a much better reason to buy gold – especially with the DGR at nearly nine and a half – than conflict in the Middle East. Keeping your eye on U.S. interest rates is a much better activity than trying to capture a war premium. When interest rates get in the high single-digit to low double-digit range, investors may opt to hold their deposits with banks. At that level, the potential earnings via interest tend to outweigh the risks of holding precious metals for many investors. A low-interest rate environment is a much better reason to own gold than because of a shooting war in Iran. Your catalyst to buy or sell gold and silver should be based on the above-mentioned fundamentals along with the gold price, the duration of the current market, the Gold / Silver Ratio (GSR), market sentiment or long-term geopolitical or social unrest. Eyes on the Horizon The reason gold is so well-suited for this role is because it slowly, surely, and methodically moves forward as we mismanage the fiat currencies we use to buy it. Unlike fiat currencies, nobody manages gold. Therefore, nobody mismanages gold either. Gold simply preserves purchasing power over the long-term. So, there is no need to chase the gold price based upon short-term catalysts. Buy gold. Hold gold. Sell gold only when you have a financial crisis. That is what your wealth insurance is there for. Remember… gold is a store of purchasing power, with high liquidity, for a potential financial crisis you hope to never have. DO NOT chase gold higher in the short-term with the hope of capturing a war premium. Keep your eye on the horizon. Keep your eye on the prize. The Bigger Picture Since then, both metals have bounced around day to day. Gold is trading mid-range from the low around $4,900 per ounce. Silver is trading at the lower end of the range after it briefly touched $75 per ounce. BOTH metals are a buy here on the dip. Buy your gold for insurance cheaper than you could a few weeks ago. Buy your silver for profit cheaper than you could a few weeks ago. Long-term, gold is going higher in price due to a loss in confidence in all fiat currencies… especially in the U.S. dollar. Central banks started this trend four years ago. Investors started buying into this trade in earnest last year. We are just getting started. Ignore short-term noise. Stay focused on sound money. Gold and silver are the best bet for those looking to preserve purchasing power… to Keep What’s Yours! We can help. Editor's Note: Bill Bonner is the Founder of Bonner Private Research and owner of the Agora Companies. This article was originally published by Bonner Private Research on February 11, 2026. You can subscribe to Bonner Private Research here (save 62% on an annual subscription with this link). Feature If you wanted to make money safely, you’d own profit making companies. Buy them when they were cheap and sell them when they were dear. But how would you know when they were cheap? Check gold. Wednesday, February 11th, 2026 The answer to that question is proprietary. But we’ll tell you anyway. Late at night, after a bottle of Malbec, we looked at an historic chart of the Dow priced in ounces of gold. We had already determined that the two things — America’s greatest corporations and the price of gold — tended to go up and down in broad, long, mutually opposed cycles.
Often, in these pages, we have referred to a workingman’s wheels — the Ford F-150 pickup — as a basic value. You could buy one in 1971 for $1,200. The price of gold was $43. So, it took 27 ounces to buy it. Today, you can pick up a new F-150 for $40,000. Or, only 8 ounces. Is gold too high? Is the truck too low? Let’s look at housing. In 1971, the average new house sold for $28,000...or 650 ounces of gold! If you want new digs today, however, you’ll have to pay $460,000...or only 92 ounces. Houses are much less expensive in gold terms, but much more expensive in dollars. Meanwhile, the price of farmland, today, is said to be about $5,000, according the Department of Agriculture. And if you look at an historic chart you see that farmland has generally, from 1971 to today, kept even with gold. One to one. What does all this mean? Tom points out that we have made money ‘for the wrong reasons.’ We expected to get to our ‘magic 5 ratio’ by reversion to the mean. Gold would go up steadily while stocks crashed. That hasn’t happened, yet. Instead, stocks were the turtle; gold was the hare. And which to bet on now? We don’t know. “You kin make a fine stew wi’ eder of dem,” Uncle Remus might say. But we don’t know what that has to do with it either. So, we’ll stick with five. Regards, Editor's Note: Alexander Green is the Chief Investment Strategist for The Oxford Club, the world's largest financial fellowship with more than 160,000 members. He's the editor of The Oxford Communiqué, The Oxford Club's flagship newsletter, and also writes two articles each week for Liberty Through Wealth, a free daily e-letter geared toward helping investors achieve true wealth. As a bestselling author, you can also buy his book "The American Dream: Why It's Still Alive... And How to Achieve It" here. This article was originally published in Liberty Through Wealth on December 15, 2025. Hard Stuff In my last column, I described how most products in the U.S. became increasingly affordable between 1980 and 2020 when measured in the number of hours worked to pay for them. However, we saw the biggest spike in inflation in 40 years during the Biden Administration, thanks to massive deficit spending, near-zero interest rates, and the temporary shutdown of the global supply chain. Yet “time prices” still came down by the end of 2024, extending the long-term trend. Between 2000 and 2024, the CPI rose 82.2%. But hourly earnings for blue-collar workers rose 115.1% – outpacing inflation by more than 40%. That means an hour of work bought 18.1% more goods and services at the end of 2024 than it did at the beginning of 2000. That’s progress. Just not the kind that the media bothers to cover. Unlike money, time can’t be counterfeited or inflated. There is perfect equality here. We all get 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. Our time is truly our most precious resource, the only one that cannot be recycled, stored, duplicated, or recovered. When time prices decrease – as they have for decades now – an hour of time buys more products and services. While people often compare what they make with someone earning more, they rarely stop to realize how much more they can buy today compared with what they could buy in the past for the same hours worked. Time prices are the one unimpeachable standard to compare abundance from one era to another. And their fall is not due to an increase in material resources. It is due to the expansion of knowledge, which enables us to use resources more creatively and effectively. This is a powerful phenomenon, yet one that is not commonly understood. Being able to afford more while working less is further evidence that most Americans are living the Dream without realizing it. Most of us take the long-term improvement in our standard of living for granted. Indeed, there is a common misconception that increasing progress and prosperity have been the norm for as long as human beings have been around. Yet history reveals that this is decidedly not the case. Imagine, for example, that the Roman statesman Cicero was magically able to time travel and visit Thomas Jefferson at Monticello more than 1,800 years later. Cicero would arrive at the coast of Virginia the same way Jefferson would have made the trip to Italy. He would ride a horse to the nearest port and trust his fate to a windblown ship. When Cicero arrived at Monticello months later, things would look quite familiar. Jefferson’s home was heated by fire in the winter, and the doors and windows were left wide open in the summer, the same as in ancient Rome. Jefferson read by candlelight, drew his water from a well, ate mostly what he raised, used an outhouse, and owned slaves, just like Romans did 18 centuries earlier. Cicero would learn that four of Jefferson’s six children did not survive early childhood. Nothing new there. This was sadly the case for most of human history. (Jefferson’s wife died at age 33 of complications from giving birth to their sixth child.) Except for a few notable innovations – like the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass – life in 1800 was hardly distinguishable from life almost 2,000 years earlier. Since then, however, there has been an explosion in human progress and prosperity. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls it the Great Enrichment, a period of exponential wealth creation that started more than 200 years ago and is still accelerating. This is plainly visible in the quality of your transportation, the speed of your communications, your many laborsaving devices, and the huge variety of goods, services, and outright luxuries available to you at the click of a button. Thomas Jefferson did not have electricity, cars, trains, airplanes, radio, television, cameras and video recorders, smart- phones, computers, lasers, batteries, the World Wide Web, antibiotics, vaccines, pacemakers, artificial hearts, MRI scans, gene therapies, and countless other lifesaving and life-enhancing innovations. What is most responsible for our exponential increase in abundance? Two things: freedom and people. Freedom is crucial because it allows people to create and profit from their innovations. (That’s why goods and services have not become cheaper for the average consumer in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and other unfree nations.) But this phenomenon is not about freedom alone. It’s also about more people. A lot more people. People generate knowledge. Knowledge multiplies output. And freedom lets people share, trade, and profit from their discoveries. The freer a society, the greater its time price gains. The more people it empowers, the richer its outcomes. Scarcity didn’t win. Innovation did. We have increased food supply, for instance, by increasing yields from existing fields. We’ve increased our agricultural efficiency so much that less than 2% of the U.S. population farms at all. After more than a century of intensive fossil fuel use, we have more known deposits of oil and gas than ever before. (And we’ve surveyed only a tiny portion of the planet.) Overpopulation is not a threat. On the contrary, limiting population growth limits brainpower. Yet generations of schoolchildren have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. Indeed, academia and the media repeatedly warn us that we are consuming the planet’s natural resources at an alarming rate… and that they will soon be gone. Not true. Resource abundance is growing faster than the world population. Our economy has reached such a level of efficiency and sophistication that we are producing an increasing amount of goods and services while using ever-fewer resources. For example, from 2014 to 2024 U.S. real gross domestic product grew by 27.6%. But, over the same period, energy consumption decreased by 1.3%. Western countries have learned how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. As we climbed the energy ladder from wood to coal to oil to gas, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in our energy sources fell steadily. As a result, fewer American cities are now shrouded in a smoggy haze. Our distant ancestors spent most of their waking hours hunting and gathering food to live. Yet the typical American today earns their food in a matter of minutes. And we are spoiled for choice at the average supermarket. We have more goods and services available – and work fewer hours to afford them – than any previous generation. The world today is incomparably richer than it was in decades past. Yet the doomsayers are unable to see it – or don’t want to. Instead, they continually warn us that the end is night. As a result, many Americans are unable to enjoy the countless advantages of modern life because they believe it is on the verge of ending – and there is nothing they can do about it. Don’t buy it. Especially the claims about “overpopulation.” The most important resource in today’s world is not oil or natural gas or some rare earth mineral. It’s people. By applying their intelligence and creativity, individual men and women make other resources more abundant. Additional people don’t just create additional demand. (Although that also promotes growth and prosperity.) They represent an additional supply of ideas, knowledge, and productive work. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of this. Or what time prices tell us. When you spend less time laboring to feed and clothe your family, put a roof over your head, keep the lights on, and pay your bills, you are gaining the ultimate wealth: more time to do what you really want. This is not just prosperity. It’s superabundance. And another reason to acknowledge that the American Dream is alive and well – for those with eyes to see it. P.S. To learn more about The American Dream – or to order your copies – click here. Editor's Note: This article was originally published back in 2015! But over a decade later, it is no less relevant or true. If you're considering buying gold, silver, or platinum right now, you must read this article. The Inside Story I mentioned in November's Perspective article we were beating the drum about Perth Mint Certificates. When you compare current premiums for physical precious metals, you’ll understand why…
Well, there is a story worth telling here about how we became involved with the Perth Mint on this project 19 years ago. And, in this story, all these questions… never asked by clients… are answered.
Problem #1… |