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Ah, the old “it’s worth 4x today’s price, but it may decline sharply” call. Very helpful.

If he wants some gold at 6000 dollars an ounce, I will be happy to sell him as much as he can afford at that price.

Very wishful thinking. I suspect that gold is already in a bubble that is going to burst, for the simple reason that, outside of electronics and some chemical applications, it is pretty useless.

During the age of Mercantilism, when the value of gold was determined by its scarcity, and it backed currency, it was a different situation. And while most economists would say that the age of Mercantilism is over, I would disagree, and say that the concept of Mercantilism still exists, but is no longer limited to specie.

Expanded Mercantilism is no longer limited by just commodities, either, but has dynamic elements such as economic activity, productivity, and research and development.

In retrospect, even the concept of Mercantilism that whoever had the most specie was the most powerful, may have been in error. The power was derived *not* from the having of specie, but from the *mining* of specie.

The ability and will to mine becomes the center of economic activity in a nation, with its benefits expanding like ripples on a pond from a pebble. Literally, a growing nation mines, and a nation in decline mines less.

To make matters even worse, gold has become utterly disconnected from the market, outside of the people who buy it and sell it.