Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
It’s a wild case of a déjà vu from the disco decade.
And I’m not the only one feeling it, which is why I sat down with the man who has successfully navigated the markets for five decades… Rick Rule, President and CEO of Rule Investment Media.
He was one of the few investors who actually got rich during the brutal stagflation and lousy stock market of the 1970s.
While most financial professionals were getting wiped out, Rick was early in natural resources and precious metals.
He used that once-in-a-generation boom to build a fortune, growing his firm Sprott’s assets under management from $300 million to over $22 billion.
So, when he says today’s market reminds him of 1973–74… you pay attention.
In today’s must-watch conversation, Rick and I explore the eerie similarities between today’s economic landscape and the stagflationary chaos of the 1970s. We discuss…
- Why the post-1982 “golden era” of cheap money and stable growth may be over
- The real inflation rate – and why the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) number might be pure fiction
- The terrifying math behind Treasury bonds (hint: the government is guaranteeing a loss)
- And why gold may be the only “currency” left without a political agenda
Rick also shares what he’s doing with his own money… including how he uses precious metals not as speculation, but as insurance against the erosion of fiat currency.
Hit “play” below to watch the full conversation now.
This isn’t some doom-and-gloom diatribe.
It’s a candid, sometimes funny, always insightful conversation between two guys who’ve been around the financial block – and know the smell of crisis and opportunity when it’s in the air.
After watching, you’ll come away with a sharper grasp of:
- Why inflation is likely to stay “stickier” than Wall Street hopes.
- How to think about gold (and silver) not just as investments… but as lifeboats.
- What makes today’s “Age of Chaos” different from the post-WWII boom.
- And where the smart money is going next.
If you owned gold in the 1970s, you were probably the smartest person in the room.
That is now even truer today.
To life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth,
Charles Sizemore
Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
P.S. Gold is a safe haven – especially with the chaos that continues to shake the markets. But protecting your wealth is only part of the equation. Growing your wealth requires strategies beyond “buy and hold.” But how do you profit from the market’s short-term moves without taking big risks?
That’s where TradeSmith’s breakthrough AI algorithm – called An-E – comes in. It can forecast stock prices 21 trading days into the future… and you’d be surprised by how many of those forecasts are spot on.
In early December 2024, An-E projected that Cintas (CTAS) would drop by 5.8% over the following month. The stock actually fell by 9.9%. While the forecast was a little off, it was still incredibly close.
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Transcript
Charles Sizemore: Hi. Charles Sizemore, Chief Investment Strategist of The Freeport Society.
It’s been an interesting start to 2025. We just came off of the worst start to the year in the stock market in years, actually the worst single quarter in about three years. We had inflation coming in harder than expected, and of course, all of this is sort of tied to the complete unraveling of the global trading system.
A lot to unpack there. But to help me do that, I have brought on a market veteran with a half century’s worth of experience, a legend himself, Mr. Rick Rule.
Rick, thanks for joining me.
Rick Rule: Pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Charles Sizemore: You bet.
Now, I know this is absolutely not your first rodeo. You have been doing this since the middle of the 1973-74 bear market. That’s when you started your career. And you did have the good fortune, good foresight, maybe a little bit of both. You go into natural resources at a time when the stock market wasn’t doing well. It was a great bull market and all things resources.
What are you seeing today? Do you see some similarities back to the 70s, for example? How does today shape up?
Rick Rule: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t try to play exactly the same game that one played in the 1970s because the world’s economy is much larger. We are, although we’re fighting it, globalized. There’s a lot of differences, but there’s a lot of similarities too.
The similarities from my point of view include the fact that people are concerned about a slowing economy. At the same time, you noted that people are concerned about stickier inflation. We had a phrase for that in the 70s called stagflation, and it was an ugly circumstance. Make no mistake, we got through it and we’ll get through this too.
I think we also need to understand, Charles, that the period 1982 to 2022, we went through 40 of the most benign years in the economy of humankind; declining real and nominal interest rates, U.S. dollar hegemony, spectacular demographics, the inclusion of billions of people into the workplace.
And I think that although the bull market, known as the ascent of humankind, hasn’t been derailed, I think it certainly is due for a pause. The bear market that you described, the 1973-1974 bear market, was particularly vicious ascribed at that point in time, I think largely to increasing interest rates.
But it’s worthy to note that that bear market occurred after an equities bull market and, for that matter, a bond bull market that began in 1946 and ran through at least 1968. And there the parallels are interesting.
We were coming off very benign economic times, where investors were schooled to buy the dips. It could be argued that, at least relative to interest rates, valuations became then and became now, somewhat excessive. That isn’t to say that there weren’t then and aren’t now bargains.
But I think perhaps we could describe what happened in 1973, 1974 is an interest rate induced hangover, and I think it was part of a broader equity market malaise that went from 1968 to 1982, a 14-year-long equities, not bear market, but malaise.
At the same time, I, of course, accidentally out of interest, was primarily involved in natural resources and precious metals. It meant, interestingly for me, young people of my time that went into conventional financial services were fighting an uphill fight, while I had the wind in my sails.
It would be well to remember that when those trends reversed themselves in 1982, our relative fortunes changed too. I had the interesting experience of a young man and being in the natural resources business and making a lot of money while all my competitors were losing money. And I had the young man’s response, which is to say, I became very confident and, in fact, hubris ridden. I found out when the commodities markets cracked, which all markets do, just how smart I was, which is to say, not very.
And I also point out that a real veteran of investing looks at a bear market the way an intelligent shopper looks at a sale for consumer goods. There are people, the Tisch family, Warren Buffett, Marty Whitman, among others, that made absolute fortunes in a bear market because they maintained their sense of arithmetic while everybody else was focused on the rhetoric.
Sorry for that long-winded answer, but you brought up a lot of recollections.
Charles: No, you just gave me a lot to unpack there. That’s fantastic stuff. One of the reasons Buffett and those others did so well during that period; one, they went into it with cash to deploy. So, to start, they weren’t fully invested in everything that was falling. They were prepared.
Before we go into that, let’s back up a minute because you had so many good points in all of that. It’s actually hard to even know where to start here. But you mentioned that from, call it ’82 until roughly the present, ’82 to 2022, if you will, that was a really benign environment. It’s funny; it never seems benign at the time because there’s always some new crisis, or there’s always something, but that was a period where interest rates went from historic highs to all-time record lows. It was a time where we had the fall of our biggest geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union. We had several decades of the Pax Americana, where we were really unrivaled in the world. Yeah, there were some skirmishes, we had enemies of course, but really pretty minor ones. Nothing that would really threaten us, and so you had this big peace dividend as well. We squandered a lot of that to be clear, but we did, and at least in theory, have this peace dividend.
You also had, we came into that period, the end of the new deal regime, if you will. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the general trend was towards more and more government, more and more control, more and more hands controlling it. You did go through a period of, we’ll call it, relative deregulation. I say relative because the state never really retrenched, but at least rhetorically there was some deregulation.
So interestingly, a lot of those trends they’ve either kind of reached the end of the road. Maybe it’s too early to say they’ve completely reversed, but we’re definitely seeing the other side of that now. We are seeing a reversal of globalization. Globalization was absolutely the trend since the 80s, where trade barriers came down year after year after year for the most part. Few exceptions here and there, but that was the trend. Interest rates falling, markets expanding, state control receding, all of that was the trend. We’re going the opposite way now.
Rick: That’s accurate. It’s also important to note, and your readers could personalize this just by looking at me, the period 1982 to 2022 evidenced the economic contribution of the baby boomers, a huge generation, coming into their earnings and savings and spending and investing years, and this decade represents at best the boomer sunset. There’s a demographic boom that helped that isn’t present. And we also had in that period really the inclusion of women in the workforce. Whether you think that’s good for society or not is none of my business. But the fact that the workforce grew to include half of humankind that had previously been excluded is important.
And I think the third thing maybe that we forget to note is Deng Xiaoping saying, “To be rich is glorious,” and to incorporate half a billion desperately poor rural Chinese into the global economy.
All those things were wonderful. And I’m not trying to say the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I’m just trying to say that at every good party, when they take away the vodka, a little bit of a hangover occurs, and I suspect that’s what’s happening now.
Charles: You don’t want to be that last guy left at the party. When they’re starting to turn the lights on and put the chairs on the table, you don’t want to be that guy left.
You bring up demographics. You make some fantastic points, because demographics move so slowly that people don’t notice. It’s that trend that’s right there out in the open. It’s slapping you in the face.
When you started your career, you guys were the biggest generation in history. There was nobody even close to you in size, and there were relatively as a percentage of the population, smaller, older people. So when you guys came in and really hit your stride starting your careers, it massively upped our productive capacity at the biggest generation in history, getting and spending, producing, buying things, building houses, whatnot. It was huge.
And then you bring up that second point about women really entering the workforce in mass. You basically doubled your productive capacity at that point. Interestingly enough, there’s no second act to that. You can’t bring women into the workforce again. They’re already there, that trend is already exhausted. The generations that have come after the baby boomers are large, but as a percentage relative to the baby boomers, they’re not bigger. And they’re not going to have that same pig passing through a python effect on everything they touch.
And then finally, China. China exported deflation to the rest of the world for 40 years because when they upped their capacity, they flooded the world with cheap manufactured goods. Well, China’s not that cheap anymore because they have demographic issues of their own. China’s population is actually shrinking already. That big migration from the countryside to the cities that’s been done for years, if not a decade or two now. There’s really not a lot of juice to squeeze out of the China growth story. If anything, China’s situation is similar to ours, but significantly worse.
So that does raise that question of, okay, then what now? Does it come back to stagflation? That dirty word you mentioned a minute ago that they should probably censor me for saying it, but let’s talk about stagflation. What is stagflation and what is our risk of that right now?
Rick: Well, I suspect that if there was a dictionary definition of stagflation, it would be slow or negative economic growth with increasing deterioration of the purchasing power of the dollar, which is to say inflation. And I need to editorialize a bit.
Our interpretation of inflation is governed by the CPI, the consumer price Index, and I think that’s a horrifically bad index. It’s important psychologically because people pay attention to it, but it has some real flaws. First of all, it’s hedonistically adjusted. It says that if your rent goes up or your mortgage goes up, but your house is nicer that you’re paying less, that’s wrong. It’s just wrong. When it’s inconvenient, it doesn’t adjust for food and fuel. Now if you had the camera on all of me, you could see that any index that doesn’t include lunch is irrelevant to me. But the biggest flaw that I see in the CPI is that it doesn’t include tax.
The largest cost of living for most American households is tax. And a cost of living index that doesn’t include tax, which is 30-something percent of GDP is completely fallacious. I would invite your listeners to do a thought experiment and construct a rough basket of goods and services that their household consumes and look at the price levels that existed in say, 2020, because I don’t want to tax people’s memories and 2025. And tell me that the purchasing power of their savings and salaries is only declining by 2.6% a year. That’s ridiculous.
Charles: It is not consistent with reality.
Rick: It’s insane. It’s truly insane. I tried the thought experiment myself, and I’m a fat, old, bald rich guy. A cheap guy too, I don’t buy much. And the basket of goods and services that I consume, including tax seems to me to be escalating somewhere around 8% compounded. And that has interesting investment components to it.
Think about this. Think if you own the world’s predominant savings instrument, the U.S. 10-year treasury, the one others are priced against. You own this treasury, the U.S. government solemnly swears to pay you 4.3 or 4.4% a year for 10 years, and they’ll do it even if they have to print it. This is riskless of course. The difficulty is that they’re paying you three or four, four in a currency where the purchasing power is declining by 7.5. The way I calculate it. That means that in the predominant savings instrument in the world, the U.S. government is guaranteeing you a loss of 3% of your purchasing power compounded for 10 years. That doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly attractive investment.
And I think that is something that society began to come to grips with in the decade of the ’70s. We had the same circumstance then. The deterioration in the purchasing power of the dollar exceeded the nominal interest rates available on savings and investment products. The market took control, of course.
You may not recall, but the political response to the bear market 1973, 1974, was to artificially increase interest rates. And by the end of 1975, they lost their nerve and reversed interest rates. When they reversed interest rates, they completely lost control of the market response to inflation. They sort of gave a treasury auction. Nobody came. And over the decade of the 1970s, the realization that savers had that they were getting a negative real yield on savings products caused the prime interest rate to go from 5.5 to 18 over the course of the decade.
I’m not saying that’s going to happen again, but I am saying that there will be economic fallout from the deterioration of the purchasing power of the dollar in excess of nominal U.S. dollar interest rates that needs to be dealt with. The market will deal with it.
Charles: That’s what the market does. It forecasts, it discounts available inflation.
You bring up a good point, and that is that things happen that cause the market to reassess the risk and returns in front of it and causes repricings. So the perception of U.S. treasuries as a risk-free return got flipped into a return free risk. And that’s why interest rates rose the way they did. That was not a fed response. That was a market response to the reality.
Now, interestingly enough, you mentioned your dollar, the purchasing power of your dollar falling year in, year out. We have an interesting new wrinkle to that, of course. And that is, of course, that the stated policy of the U.S. government right now is to boost exports and balance the trade deficit. Well, great, but the only real way to do that is to lower the value of the dollar relative to other world currencies.
Yes, tariffs, whatever, fine, they’ll have an impact. But if you want to really move the needle on the trade deficit, you have to lower the value of the dollar. Well, that sounds great, I guess if you’re exporting stuff. But for the rest of us that are using our dollars to live, that’s a big problem.
Rick: You make some great points. I hope your listeners are paying real attention.
You said earlier in the interview that China was responsible for deflation. The American consumer should thank the Chinese for that. When they go to Costco and Walmart, they should thank the Chinese for the quality goods at low prices. Now, the American worker, who is also an American consumer, probably has some problem with being out-competed by those same Chinese.
And the point you make importantly is one that we may get to later in the interview, but it goes to gold. Gold would appear to me to be the only commonly acceptable medium of exchange that doesn’t have a built-in political constituency for devaluation. The Japanese have tried to devalue the yen successfully for 70 years. The Chinese, from time to time tried to artificially devalue the renminbi. The Koreans have done it. The U.S. has done it. It has happened in Canada without them having to try too hard. Their policies have done that for them.
But the truth is, one of the things that has always attracted me to gold is that gold doesn’t have a political constituency that favors devaluation. There’s no popular voter-backed manipulation downwards of the price of gold.
Charles: No, the only way you could devalue gold would be to go on a massive mining spree and just dig a bunch of it out of the ground. And of course, that’s expensive. And the cost involved would maintain the value of gold. So I suppose people could come out of the woodwork and sell their jewelry or whatnot, but there’s not a central bank. There’s not the central bank of gold that can just flood the market by making a few strokes on a keyboard. That doesn’t exist.
Rick: Yeah. The real risk to gold, I think is intelligent government action, and I don’t suspect that we’ll see that in my lifetime.
Charles: Oh, then there’s no risk. If the risk to gold is intelligent governance, then there’s no risk.
Rick: Right. That’s my feeling.
Charles: Well, let’s talk about that. So you’re an experienced natural resource investor, like we said, you’ve been doing this for half a century. You’ve seen bull markets, you’ve seen bear markets, you’ve seen everything else. How do you feel about precious metals right now? Do you have a preference, gold versus silver versus whatever? Tell us the state of the precious metals market to you. What are you seeing?
Rick: I believe that the gold investor is primarily an insurance investor. He or she buys gold to shield themselves against the deterioration of purchasing power of whatever Fiat denominated savings products or the alternatives.
Silver by contrast, is more of a speculator’s material. So I think depending, your choice between gold and silver, really depends on your orientation, conservatism and investing, which by now is where I am. Or speculation. My experience has been in precious metals bull markets that the narrative, the rhetoric is established by gold, the first buyer is the fear buyer.
When the price momentum is established by gold and the price momentum validates the narrative and the generalist investor comes into the space, the generalist investor tends towards silver. And at some point in time in a precious metals bull market, leadership takes over from gold and goes to silver, and I suspect that’ll happen in this market. That being said, I’m an old fat rich guy. I’m much more safety oriented.
Charles: You’re what we all aspire to be someday, Rick.
Rick: Best wishes. I hope, in fact, I have faith that you’ll get there.
Charles: My cardiologist may prefer that I keep the fat part to a minimum, but the rest I’m on board with.
Rick: I’ll stay away from that one. When people ask me and they do, when is gold going to move? I sort of scratch my chin sagely and I say, “I think it’s going to move in 2000.” In the year 2000, the stuff was $250. Now it’s $3000. It’s up 12 fold. It’s up eight and a half or 9% compounded in 25 years. So gold is going to start to move 25 years ago.
I’m afraid, and I mean that literally, I’m afraid that the move is going to become much more aggressive. I’m in the odd position of owning a lot of gold and hoping it doesn’t go up because the set of circumstances that makes gold go up can be very rough on the rest of your life. And my life is really, really good. I don’t want this disruption.
But let’s talk about the arithmetic as opposed to my own wants. Gold does well historically when people are concerned about the deterioration of their purchasing power in Fiat denominated instruments. Let’s talk about why people might be afraid. Well, from the first instance, getting paid 4.3 in a currency where the purchasing power is declining by seven and a half means that you have a government guarantee that you’re going to lose 3% of your purchasing power every year for 10 years. Maybe the first government promise of my life that I believe they’ll keep, but it’s not one that comforts me.
The background math is worse, Charles, and I really hope your listeners pay attention to this. I’m talking about U.S. dollar listeners, the world’s reserve currency. The on-balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government are approaching $37 trillion. It’s such a big number that people’s eyes roll, but it’s a real number. It’s 37 with 12 zeros before the decimal point. Now that number is only 29 trillion if you X out the Fed’s own balance sheet. So just for fun, let’s use the 29. Let’s use the good number. The problem isn’t that really, although that’s a big problem. The much bigger problem is that according to the Congressional budget office, not some old libertarian crankpot, the net present value of unfunded off balance sheet government promises, little things, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, Social Security.
Charles: Oh yeah, just the things people require to live. That’s all.
Rick: That number, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the net present value, not the nominal value, exceeds $100 trillion. So the aggregate on and off-balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government exceed $130 trillion.
This is problematic for at least two reasons.
The Internal Revenue Service, again, not some cranky old libertarian, suggests that the private net worth of American citizens is $141 trillion. So subtract 130 from 141. That number’s $11 trillion. But it gets worse. The on-balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government, which is to say the deficit, is increasing by $2 trillion a year. That’s widely known. The off balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government, which is to say the net present value of unfunded promises, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, military pensions is also increasing by $2 trillion a year. So if our private net worth is 141 and we owe 130 and the number that we owe is increasing by four, the arithmetic becomes obvious.
Now, how do we deal with this? Well, I think we fiddle around the edges. We say to old fat rich guys like me, we’re going to take away the cap on your Social Security tax. That’ll be unpopular, but people hate people who’ve been successful, so it’ll pass politically. At the same time, we means-test Social Security, which means that they’ll tax me on a hundred percent of my income and they won’t give me Social Security. I get it. And I think they raise the eligibility age. At the time Social Security was instituted, it provided you poverty-level subsistence at age 65, and the median life expectancy of an American male was 66 years. So it covered you for a year. And there were lots of young folks and not many old folks. Well, that’s all changed.
So all of that fiddling around the edges doesn’t do much. It just reduces the accretion of unfunded liabilities. What I think they have to do, Charles, is I think they have to do what we did in the decade of the seventies.
In the decade of the seventies, according to the Office of Management Budget, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar declined by 75%. So while we honored the nominal value of our obligations, we devalued the real obligations. We didn’t index capital gains tax or income to inflation. So the government income rose while the net present value of the government obligations fell. If I had to guess, I’d guess that the next 10 years will see a similar devaluation in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. I think the U.S. dollar, 10 years from now, will purchase 75% less than it does today.
I think that will happen because I think otherwise, we will not be able to fund the nominal obligations that we have under Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal pensions, and military pensions. If that happens, I think the response that gold saw in the decade of the seventies could be repeated, not to the same extent. Remember, in the decade of the seventies, while the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar fell by 75%, the gold price went up 30-fold. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see a rise in the nominal price of gold that mirrors the decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar over the next 10 years.
Charles: Let me cut in just for a second, Rick. That’s a really good point. You mentioned earlier that the reason for buying gold is not speculative, it’s conservative. The reason to buy gold is as insurance, so you don’t necessarily need gold to go up 30 times or whatnot. And why did it go up that much in the seventies? Well, because the price of gold had been artificially pegged lower for decades, and when you finally took the peg off, it shot up like a spring. We don’t have that today, of course. So the conditions are a little bit different.
But to your point, if you want something that should hold its value against a dollar, that may lose 75% of its value or more, 75 may prove to be conservative, then that’s where gold comes in.
Rick: Exactly. One more piece of arithmetic that I think is instructive. The market share of gold is infinitesimal today. JP Morgan Chase suggests that the market share of precious metals and precious metals related investments relative to other savings and investment classes in the United States market is one half of 1%, which is to say that one half of 1% of savings investment assets in the United States market is comprised of precious metals.
JP Morgan Chase suggests that the similar figure for the last four decades, four and a half decades now, is 2%. If the problems that I’ve just described become commonly understood, I wouldn’t be surprised if the market share for precious metals and precious metals related securities overshot. But if they merely reverted to mean, then demand for the stuff goes up fourfold. If you understand the prices are set on the margin, not through the whole transaction chain, and you think about the possible, and I’m not trying to say the definite impact. If you think about the possible impact on the gold price, that’s pretty profound.
Charles: No, absolutely it is. But you bring up another good point. You said if it reverts to the mean. When have you ever seen a market revert to the mean? They always overshoot both directions.
We like to imagine the market is rational and the market is rational over time, like that price discovery function works over time. The market kind of overshoots and then eventually kind of finds an equilibrium, but at any given point, it’s generally overshooting or undershooting.
So I think, to your point, I think it is very likely that gold overshoots on that, that people do what is natural, that they follow the momentum, and when they see gold rising, they end up avoiding it, which is what a rational trader would do. So it’s a very long way of saying, I think you’re onto something.
Rick: And the rational response I think is to understand the role of gold, which is to say some people when they hear this argument put a hundred percent of their net worth in gold, which is insane. As insurance, a small bit of premium goes a long way if the gold price goes up.
Charles: Let me ask you a question, because you bring up an excellent point, and I really would like to hear. I think my viewers here would really like to get your opinion on this. What do you consider a sensible allocation to gold for the typical person? Now, obviously every person’s different. Their net worth is different, their age. It’s different.
Rick: That’s a really hard question to answer. If there’s a person who’s a retired person who doesn’t have active income and has most of his or her portfolio and long bonds where they get murdered by inflation, they need to have a high allocation to gold. If by contrast, there’s a younger person who adds a lot of value to the economy and is in an occupation where capacity is scarce, where they have pricing power in a broad economy and where they have, as an example, an intelligently leveraged real estate portfolio, a built-in inflation hedge, or they own a private business that has pricing power, they need to own a lot less gold.
A financial planner who looked at my estate and they saw as an example that I was the largest shareholder of Sprott, which is a precious metals-oriented money manager, $35 billion in assets under management, would say, “Rick, why do you own any gold at all? If the gold price goes up, free cash flow at Sprott’s going to go crazy, the stock’s going to go crazy and there’s going to be franchise value.”
But you know what? Gold helps me sleep nights and stay calm, and so I own more gold than I probably should. The point of this whole soliloquy is I’m not suggesting that people go way overweight gold, because when gold moves, it really, really, really moves. And a fairly small allocation can cover a lot of sin elsewhere in people’s portfolios.
I am suggesting that people who look at the market begin to look at the market the way that Buffett and others did, which is to say not as a subject in and of itself, but rather as a facility to buy and share, buy and sell fractional ownership and businesses. I think that’s very, very, very important. I think that they need to look at the market as a facility rather than as a subject, because there were investors in that whole malaise that we talked about, 73 to 82, that made a ton of money despite the fact that the market went nowhere.
I mean, Buffett was generating 25% compound internal rates of return for 14 years in a market that was directionless, and I hope that that lesson isn’t lost on your listeners. This isn’t just about buy gold. This is about: Buy gold, look at other forms of resources, but act rationally with the rest of your portfolio. In particular, be afraid of your long bond portfolio.
Charles: Rick, that is some of the most balanced commentary, balanced advice I’ve heard in a long time.
Usually people tend to be very passionate and emotional about this, and they’ll let their emotions kind of do that talking for them. “Put everything in gold.” “Put nothing in gold.” “Buy, put everything in Nvidia stock,” whatever.
You’re being very balanced here, and I think one of the biggest takeaways that I would take personally is look at your overall situation. What is your risk to dollar depreciation? What is your risk to inflation? And if you have other hedges, then gold becomes less important at that point. Not to say it doesn’t add value, but it’s certainly less important if you are a highly exposed to inflation and people living on fixed income or people living on pensions, people living on social security are absolutely highly exposed to inflation, then owning gold becomes more critically important. I think if nobody gets anything else from this conversation, I would think that that takeaway alone would be enough to change a person’s life. That really is a big deal.
Rick: Thank you. That’s my hope.
Charles: Well, Rick, I really enjoyed this. You’ve given us a lot to chew on. I think personally, I would say if for any of the viewers out there that don’t already own some gold, if nothing else, please take this conversation under advisement. Really follow Rick’s advice here. Look at your situation, figure out how exposed you are to depreciating dollar to inflation and act accordingly. Add some gold if it makes sense for you. Definitely give your portfolio a hard look though, because the regime we’re in today is a very different regime. This isn’t the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. 2020s are a different decade with a different set of risks.
I think we can wrap it up now, but thanks for joining me and I’d love to have you on again sometime.
Rick: I’d love to be back. I’d love to give your listeners an incentive to pay more attention to me, which is to say that if you like what I have to say about gold and other natural resources, which we didn’t talk about today, but hopefully we can later, I can personalize it.
Any of your listeners who go to my website, ruleinvestmentmedia.com, can list their precious metals and natural resource stocks, and I will no obligation and for free rank them 1 to 10, 1 being best, 10 being worst. I’ll comment on individual issues if I think my comments might have value, but please be a little patient. I’m about 250 rankings behind. But all you have to do is go to ruleinvestmentmedia.com. List your natural resource stocks. I’ll send you back the rankings by email, but I’ll probably send them back in seven or eight days as opposed to the same day, and I look forward to doing that. I’m told done it for over a hundred thousand investors in the last 25 years.
Charles: Wow. A hundred thousand investors, that is not a small number.
All right. I would really strongly encourage anybody watching this to take Rick up on his offer. This is a legendary natural resources investor who’s been doing this for over 50 years. You really don’t get access to a mind like that very, very often or very easily, so absolutely take Mr. Rule here, take him up on this.
On that note, we can wrap it up for today.
To life, liberty, the pursuit of wealth,
This is Charles Sizemore signing off.