You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.

Over the past decade or so, you have seen the flip side of that as you've seen stock prices have come down a lot relative to gold. Now you are getting a change where people are more comfortable holding gold because in the rear-view mirror it doesn't look so bad for gold. Bonds have not come down as much relative to gold, but I think the bond bubble is going to burst and will be falling for years too. And gold will look that much better.

Gold is not overvalued at $500, and gold will not be overvalued at $1,500 or $2,000. The real money is buying gold and putting it away.

When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.

There is simply no way to sustain an economy based on consumer credit.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

Once the dollar begins to collapse beneath the weight of all this new deficit spending, accumulation of contingency liabilities and the socialization of our economy, commodity prices and interest rates will head skyward.