"Gold and Economic Freedom Are Inseparable." Alan Greenspan

[00:00:00]An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unite unites statists of all persuasions. It's not just a left and right thing. Uh they seem to sense perhaps more clearly and subtly uh than many consistent defenders of Lefair that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

[00:00:26]Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, Manco 64, home of Alternative Economics and Contrarian Views. So, it's great to be back home. It was great as well to spend a week with with the rest of my family, with my mother, my sisters, and uh to see uh my niece, my grand nieces as well. Uh don't get to see them very often. Uh yeah, Rudy will be uh back tomorrow. So, he's had a a week's uh holiday. No work for him for a week. And uh yeah, I'd like to thank all of you who subscribed yesterday to the channel.

[00:01:07]So, today we're going to look at a couple of things. China and how the Chinese are continuing to buy uh gold handover fist for the the first five months of this year.

[00:01:20]Uh yeah, we're going to look into that.

[00:01:23]There's a an article about that uh on Bloomberg.

[00:01:29]And then I want to touch upon Alan Greenspan who passed away yesterday at 100 years old. Um he yeah he was the he's known as having been the chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost 20 years and I remember him well. Uh it was right smack in the middle of my uh career in the city of London in the financial sector and uh yes I I'm going to give you my verdict on Alan Greenspan and and uh yes he was a central banker but there's a lot more to him than that I think. So let's start with China though and the gold situation and and I think uh what this gold situation shows is that the Chinese public the Chinese uh mentality and culture u they they've been exposed to currency collapses much more recently than we have in the west and uh they know what gold is and even silver because I think The name for bank in Chinese is silver. But anyway, Bloomberg reported yesterday uh China's uh gold imports surged to most in more than 2 years.

[00:02:53]Uh China's monthly gold imports reached their highest in more than two years in May, showing the world's biggest buyers appetite for bullion remain resilient as prices remained under pressure. And I like to uh differentiate uh demand for bullion and speculation in in this highly uh speculative uh paper market that is not just the uh FX market where LBMA gold is traded and silver but also the futures market. And these markets are there on purpose for the bankers to manipulate and control the price because they don't really trade physical metal uh in those markets. They rarely ever take delivery. It's only when uh delivery is is very heavy that they have problems. And that's why I always tell people that they need to get physical. Forget about ETFs, forget about futures. Um, of course, mining companies is a different story. You're buying a share in a company uh that is either exploring or either producing the metal. Anyway, uh enough of that rant.

[00:04:10]Let's continue. Uh imports were around 163 tons last month. Uh the highest since March 2024 according to customs data released on Saturday. volumes for the first five months of 2026 were about 692 tons. That's huge. And I I think uh a lot of that is also the central bank, the People's Bank of China. Yeah. Officially they're they're buying a few tons a month, but I'm sure a lot of those tons seep through into stateowned CCP institutions.

[00:04:53]Um, yeah, we've been told central banks have been buying about a thousand tons a month since 20 a year, excuse me, since 2022.

[00:05:04]That's all world's major central banks.

[00:05:06]And here we have the Chinese on pace to buying like uh almost 1,500 tons a year. So, I I think it's highly significant and it's not going to stop.

[00:05:20]and uh they don't care about the price.

[00:05:23]They care about having the physical insurance and that's what I've been telling you um for years. So that's up by 76% from a year earlier. Uh Chinese demand for physical bullion bars as well as metal linked to gold accumulation plants have been among the main drivers of the surge said Jang Jen a researcher at Guang Guanju Southern Gold Market Academy. Accumulation plans refer to uh low barrier products that allow investors to buy gold incrementally.

[00:05:59]Well, they know about dollar cost avering averaging the Chinese. Gold prices have retreated by uh about a quarter from the record highs reached in January, weighed down by global inflation fears amid the war in the Middle East.

[00:06:16]That doesn't make sense, right? The the more you fear inflation, the more you should have gold. But anyway, this is Bloomberg. A strong buy from Chinese consumers was a key catalyst for the the January frenzy and domestic demand has since moderated but without a major slump.

[00:06:36]How can it have moderated if it's up 76% from last year? Doesn't make sense either. Bloomberg. Uh, China also started implementing a new import licensing licensing regime for gold from June 1st.

[00:06:52]Uh, with certain banks facing fewer restrictions, but the change may have prompted some banks to use up their existing quotas before the new system began, Song said. So, there you go.

[00:07:07]uh yeah, they're buying uh incrementally and I think a lot of this gold is going into the state coffers as well. And I think China of course has a lot more gold than the 2,300 tons that is publicly uh known known about. And I think the US might have a lot less than the 8,130 odd metric tons that they profess to have. Uh but that's a different topic.

[00:07:40]So now to Allan Greenspan and um I've read some of the obituaries on Greenspan and it said that he he was formerly a gold bug and a sound money proponent. Well, I I want to correct that because I met Ron Paul at the Mises Institute 20th anniversary conference back in 2002. I went there with my wife.

[00:08:08]Uh I just started looking into the Austrian School of Economics. I read Iron Rand uh Atlas Shrugged and uh I went up to Ron Paul in one of the uh lectures. He was watching the lecture as well. And uh I had a chat with him and I asked him about Allan Greenspan and gold and economic freedom, the article he he wrote in 1966.

[00:08:35]Uh and uh Ron Paul told me that in Congress once when Greenspan was testifying the Humphrey Hawkins testimony and Ron Paul was in the uh banking committee uh usually and he questioned uh Greenspan. But a after the testimony, he went up to uh Alan Greenspan with the article and he asked uh Alan Greenspan to autograph it and he did. and he asked Alan Greenspan, "Do you still believe in what you wrote back in 1966?" And he said 100%. He did. Uh yes. Granted, this was 24 years ago, but I don't think he's changed his view uh up until recently when he died. I think he believed in it. And one of the reasons he told um Ron Paul uh we we don't have a gold standard, we don't have sound money is because the public uh the public always wants uh something for nothing. Not just the public, but Wall Street uh yeah, investors uh they don't like things going down. They want to see their portfolios go up. Wall Street wants to see their profits uh continue to go higher. Uh Congress wants to keep spending to keep their constituents happy. And uh the only constituents who learned the opposite were Ron Paul's constituents because he was asked as well, how come you get elected all the time and you you're Mr. No, you promise nothing.

[00:10:25]And he uh he said yes because I've explained to my constituents that to for him to promise them something, he's got to take it from another group of people.

[00:10:38]So, it's very simple. And this is what uh this article is all about. And I'm going to put a link to it in the description. It says here it's not secure uh but u you can Google it.

[00:10:51]Golden golden economic freedom uh by Alan Greenspen. You might find another link. Uh I won't go through the whole thing, but um I'll go uh through the introduction here. He says, "An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unite unites statists of all persuasions. It's not just a left and right thing." Uh they seem to sense perhaps more clearly and subtly uh than many consistent defenders of Leafair that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.

[00:11:30]That the gold standard is an instrument of Leafair and that each implies and requires the other.

[00:11:39]In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society. And I'm just going to go through the first paragraph here and then you can read the rest and then I'm going to go through to to the end of the article.

[00:11:58]Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions.

[00:12:04]It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange. It is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services and can therefore be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value i.e. as a means of saving.

[00:12:33]So he goes on to say uh to conclude in the absence of the gold standard there's no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.

[00:12:43]Uh there's no safe store value. I if there were the government would have to make its holding illegal as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other goods and therefore declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods.

[00:13:15]Financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way uh for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

[00:13:23]Don't forget this was written in ' 66.

[00:13:26]It was only in 75 they that they legalized it again. How were they able to keep uh the fiat system going if people could now legally own gold and well silver was wasn't illegal but gold?

[00:13:41]Well, it's all to do with the uh paper market manipulation and uh I've done many videos about that.

[00:13:50]how the powers that be just before gold was legalized in 75 were told by the bullion dealers in London that they needed a futures market to keep people uh away from physical just speculating and making uh gold or paper gold highly volatile and they're still doing it to this day but I I think we're near the end of this scheme uh and maybe they hired Greenspan because he knew knew about that.

[00:14:20]Greenspan, I think at one point uh thought he could emulate the gold standard through the fiat currency system by keeping uh the price of gold stable u controlling interest rates. Of course, that isn't possible, but uh he goes on to say this is the shabby secret of the welfare statistic spending. And yes, the current administration uh is doing record deficit spending in a period of supposedly economic growth.

[00:14:57]There's no recession, right? Says deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

[00:15:06]Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in in understanding the statists antagonism toward the gold standard.

[00:15:24]There you go. Uh great essay. It's helped me a lot understand the system and I thank Alan Greenspan for it. Um, what about the fact that he joined the uh central banking uh Wall Street camp by becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve? Well, I'm not going to judge him. I don't know the circumstances uh his circumstances for deciding that.

[00:15:53]But one thing I would say uh he if he hadn't become chairman uh of the board of the Federal Reserve I probably would never have heard about uh Allan Greenspent and this essay on gold. So in a way uh maybe uh he was trying to subvert the system from within because he he was the guy uh who gave the system what they wanted free money and he's the one who started I would say this everything bubble with the green green spend put I guess we will never know. I I always wanted to uh like maybe interview Allan Greenspan and maybe ask him about that, but of course he probably wouldn't have admitted anything like that. One thing I know is that uh this uh essay is a must readad uh for proponents of sound money, small government, and freedom. And with that, I'm going to wish you all a very good day. Take care. Bye.