James Delingpole James Delingpole

How I became a 24-carat goldbug

If you’re at all worried about the current global financial situation, here’s what I advise: buy gold. Then buy some more gold. Then buy some gold coins to stash under your bed and in various hiding places known only to yourself. Sovereigns are good if you’re British because, being legal tender, they are not subject to capital gains tax. Oh, and if you’re investing in bullion — which you must — make sure it’s in a spread of locations: London, Hong Kong, ­Geneva, wherever. That’s because when the shit hits the fan (WTSHTF as we catastrophists fondly abbreviate it), no one has any idea which regimes will be safe and which will be punitively confiscatory as, for example, was dear old F.D. Roosevelt’s when he suddenly took it upon himself to ‘cure’ America’s economic crisis by banning private ownership of gold.

Think I’m sounding over the top here? Well obviously I hope I’m being OTT too. It’s certainly preferable to the alternative, which is that I’m right. And even if I’m wrong, I’d still say gold is looking pretty cheap at the moment. As I write it’s languishing in the $1,500s and there are those who believe that by the end of the year — what with Europe falling off a cliff and America, whatever Ben Bernanke says, heading for QE3 — it may well have breached $2,000 an ounce. But hell, what do I know? I’m just a goldbug and obsessing about gold — how to buy it, how to hold it, how far it has got to go — is what we goldbugs do. I entered the pupal phase of goldbuggery last year, at about the time I read Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse and started getting interested in the Austrian school of economics and worried about the inflationary effects of Osborne’s and Bernanke’s money-printing.

It’s only since my recent trip to Oz, though, that I emerged, all shimmery from my pupa — with Shirley Bassey singing ‘Gold-fin-gah’ in the background, probably — into the fully fledged, 24-carat goldbug I am today.

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