Golden Dreams & Delusions: The Story about Gold You Haven't Heard (PART 1)

The following article is more than 80 pp. in length and has been divided into 7 parts. This series of articles represents the most insightful analysis on the gold pumping scene ever published. And it was written by the man who actually spotted the gold bull market in 2001, advised gold to his clients, but was wise enough to have forecast the peak in gold at $2000 two years before it was reached, and warned the public that once the bubble burst, gold and silver would spend many years in a bear market.

The Beginnings of My Bullish Stance on Gold

The year 2001 is likely to be very memorable to most people for different reasons. For many people, the year 2001 brings back memories of the attack on the World Trade Center by the Mossad and CIA.

The collapse of the stock market immediately after this catastrophic act of domestic and foreign terrorism was an extremely easy call to make despite the fact that the jug heads and crooks on CNBC were telling their sheep audience not to sell. That year was also memorable to me because it was the year I recognized the early stages of the gold bull market. 

I was still working at Bear Stearns at the time. Gold was trading for less than $300/ounce, largely where it had traded for the better part of the past 10 or 12 years. I managed to convince a few clients to invest in some gold companies I liked, but most of my clients were still traumatized by the dotcom charade and the post-911 collapse.

Who could blame them? This was a period marked by massive accounting fraud by hundreds of companies and a huge dotcom pump-and-dump scheme resulting in trillions of dollars in losses to investors. And now they thought Arab terrorists were out to get them.

I bought some gold for myself; one or two gold stocks. A couple of years later I bought some gold and silver coins.   

Shortly thereafter, I finally had enough of Wall Street. After closely monitoring the fine details of the dotcom pump-and-dump by Wall Street and corporate America, there was not one single criminal prosecution from the dotcom charade. So I left the securities industry disgusted from top to bottom after finally realizing the criminal nature of Wall Street. I no longer wanted to be part of that criminal organization.

As a bonus, I was no longer held hostage to a criminal organization that treats its most of its non-Jewish employees like dog shit.

Make no mistake, this is a filthy industry from top to bottom. It’s filled with sleaze balls with no moral compass whatsoever unless those morals have to do with getting coked up and spending the money that you didn’t earn on strippers and hookers.  

You don’t make many real friends on Wall Street, unless you don’t mind having your business stolen from under your eyes. No one you work with trusts you because they know who they are and what they stand for, so they assume everyone else is just as much of a low-life as they are.

My years working in the industry can be summed up in two words: dehumanizing and demoralizing. But the experience did teach me about the other side humanity that I had no prior experience with; that of shady con artists, compulsive liars and overall bizarre fellows who were incapable of making it elsewhere.

This is the reality about Wall Street you’re never going to hear about. Perhaps I’ll talk about it more another time.

I headed for the venture capital (VC) industry, thinking it was somehow on a higher moral playing field. It seemed like a great fit for me to utilize my extensive background in the life sciences. And I had already worked on several private equity deals with my Wall Street firm prior to leaving. The VC industry was certainly not transaction-based, and that in itself seemed like a good way to allow one to actually help create value rather than scalp it off of others.

At the time, I actually thought the industry was all about helping to create value helping entrepreneurs, and in the process helping the investors of your fund. I thought the VC firms involved in the dotcom pump-and-dump were the exceptions.

After a few years I realized that in many ways, the VC industry was not much different than Wall Street. Certainly, there are some really good guys in the industry, similar to Wall Street. But they were the rare, very rare exceptions.

Over the next year or two, as I worked on several startups, I also continued researching the markets and economy in my spare time in order to publish an informal newsletter for a few institutions. But I kept coming to the same conclusions over and over.

Things looked really bad no matter anyway you sliced it. It was laid out in front of my face. And it seemed so obvious to me. Yet, at the time there was not one single book on the market that revealed what I felt was inevitable.

There were some books on America’s debt (which was relatively small at the time) and a few books on real estate, but most were telling you how to become a “real estate millionaire.”

As I continued to research the market for books on the economy, I was unable to locate nothing remotely close to my own findings. It would take me a few years to understand why no one else saw what I did, but that is an entirely different story.

In short, the book publishing industry is nothing more than a platform used by authors to pitch their business to sheep. For publishers, it’s all about selling as many books as possible regardless how inaccurate or useless they are.

Of course, things didn’t used to be this way. There was a time when the publishing industry had some standards. Today, any dildo who makes a splash on TV for any reason can get a book deal. And these books are always ghost-written with the clown's name slapped on the cover as the author. Do I need to mention that this is fraud?

Yet, most of the guys you see on TV claiming to release books don't write much of the books with their name on it.

You might want to ask Peter Schiff why his comic book, How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes bears such a striking resemblance to a book written by his father Irwin Schiff some twenty-seven years ago entitled, How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't.

I'd be very interested to hear his answer.

So long as you are part of the media club, you can sell shit on a stick and you will have millions of takers. 

But if you have no exposure, you won’t be able to get a blueprint of the future published. By now, hopefully you understand what the media looks for when it selects its so-called "experts."  If not, read this article.

I won't even get into how generic, open-ended, misguided and inaccurate Peter Schiff's books are. 

Why I Wrote America’s Financial Apocalypse 

Because I believed the U.S. would enter a severe and persistent downward spiral resulting in a historic period of catastrophic economic devastation, I decided to stop everything I was doing and write a book in order to warn investors hoping to help them salvage what they had remaining from the dotcom scam.

Early on, I decided to call the book America’s Financial Apocalypse.

By the time I was finished it was (first) released in late 2006.

Unlike every other investment book written around that time and thereafter, my motivation for this exhaustive undertaking was not to serve as a marketing tool for either myself or my firm.

There was no mention of my website in this book. In fact, I had no plans to create a website since I had been dealing with institutional investors and VC firms.

Three years after America’s Financial Apocalypse was released, I decided to launch a website in order to combat the mass ban placed on me by the media and Internet gold bug and other charlatans.

Although I recommended gold in the book, I did not endorse any gold dealers unlike others who received hidden payments for these arrangements or else were gold dealers themselves.

Finally, I did not pimp my firm, unlike others who mention their firm in every other page of their books.

Thus, America’s Financial Apocalypse was written specifically and exclusively to serve as a public service in order to help investors avoid what I felt would be catastrophic losses.

My motives were pure and were meant specifically to help people. At the time I did not realize this was a unique motivation. I suppose I gave humanity too much credit. I'm not telling you this because I want a pat on the back. I'm telling you this hoping you will see through the smoke and mirrors.

If the book was remembered for just one thing, rather than the fact that it has predicted virtually every detail of the collapse, I would rather it be known as the book that was written only for the purpose of helping Main Street.

What I have learned since then is that if you try to help people in an unbiased manner, it means you will be exposing crooks and con artists. Perhaps this is why virtually everyone on the internet has joined the media to ban me.

Although I rushed the book out to print in order to maximize the relevance to readers, it took me nearly two years to complete. I didn’t know how I was going to be compensated for this long and painstaking project. But for some reason I was not concerned about this. I felt that saving people’s retirement would be satisfying enough and assumed that I would be able to pay the bills that were backing up.  

As more of the forecasts from America’s Financial Apocalypse materialized, rather than the media banging on my door, I was shunned and ignored. I then realized that I had been black-listed by the entire media industry. This meant my efforts were largely wasted.

Meanwhile, gold dealers and paid pumpers were featured as “experts” because the media wanted to create setups for its gold advertisements.

Despite the fact that virtually none of these gold whores has any real credibility, many of them have reaped millions of dollars through the publicity provided by the media. Sadly, they have no idea what they are talking about and those who have followed them for investment advice are most likely bound to lose a great deal.

For instance, I cannot think of single one of these individuals who

       - Consistently provides accurate stock market forecasts (virtually none of them even attempts to forecast the Dow Jones other than claiming it's headed to 1000)

           - Understands basic economics

            - Knows how to conduct prudent securities analysis  

            - Has a working knowledge of professional valuation analysis 

            - Has a decent track record

I had no editor or ghost writer like everyone else who “writes” books. The reason of course is because publishers refused to touch the book. As I would later realize, it was too controversial to receive the support of an establishment publishing house. At the time, I did not realize the criminal nature of the publishing industry.   

As those who read America’s Financial Apocalypse recall, in addition to recommending gold and silver, I also forecast a market collapse, with the possibility of 6000 in the Dow, recommended shorting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, many other financial firms and so forth.

A small sample of the forecasts that have materialized can be found here.

Accordingly, for every category of investor, at the top of the recommendation list was to hold a large cash position in order to stand ready to buy after the market collapsed.

I’m not going to get into all of the forecasts made in the book that have since materialized because this would require numerous pages. The point I’m trying to make is that when I released the book, gold was trading for around $650/ounce.

Are You Reading the Right Books Written by the Right People?

It’s been nearly six years since the book was released. Today, I see so many useless books being promoted by the scumbags in the media; books specifically meant to serve as a marketing tool; books that offer no real insight; books that dramatize the fraud or discuss the obvious; books written by the same scumbags who failed to warn people about this depression, the financial collapse and criminality of Wall Street.

These books have been written by the same lying, scumbag, criminal, idiots who were largely responsible for investors losing their shirts because they either failed to spot the collapse or else were too stupid to see it coming.

And now these scum bags are profiting from naïve readers who are actually supporting those who contributed to their losses by buying their books! This is simply amazing.  

Even though these books were published several years after America’s Financial Apocalypse; even though the content of these books offers no real utility to investors, many more people have read these books without even knowing about America’s Financial Apocalypse.

Make no mistake. This is NOT about me. But I feel my story serves as an example to illustrate some very important points.

First, it serves as a reminder of just how gullible and naive most people are. They make the media powerful because they allow the media to influence their thoughts, opinions and decisions.

Even after being duped by the media, they still line up without realizing it was the media that was largely responsible for their losses. This explains why the cycle always repeats.

Why should the snake oil salesmen change their tactics when they work every time?

The remainder of this article is published in six additional parts due to its length (80 pages). The list below shows the subtitles of the remaining six parts of this article.

·        Why I Became Cautious on Gold (PART 2)

·        Who are these Gold Bugs? (PART 2)

·        Why Most People Get Conned (PART 2)

·        Myths about Gold Preached by Gold Charlatans (PART 3) 

·        Gold Charlatans Think the U.S. is Similar to Zimbabwe (PART 3) 

·        Gold is NOT Money; It’s Jewelry (PART 3)          

·        Gold Bugs and Conspiracy Nuts (PART 4)

·        Gold Dealers are Ripping You Off (PART 5)

·        The Myth about Money Supply and Inflation (PART 5)

·        Why Hyperinflation Isn’t Going to Happen in the U.S. (PART 5)

·        Forecasting Gold and Silver Pricing is a Guessing Game (PART 6)

·        “Do as I Say, Not As I Do” (PART 6)

·        How to Determine if Your Sources Can be Trusted (PART 7)

·        Buy-and-Hold is Even More Dangerous for Gold than Stocks (PART 7)