I’m sure I was in my teens, working in my dad’s drug store in Washington, D.C., when a nice insurance salesman came in and told me of a great buy his company had just publicized for young workers. No medical exam was needed—just assurance that I was healthy—and he offered me a $5,000 life insurance policy for a mere $10 a month, or $120 a year. They were going to insure my life for $5,000 at a mere cost of $120 a year. I figured that I had no intentions of dying, and that $10 would buy me 40 gallons of gas or a new tire for my car. A new 600:16 tire then was $9.95. In my dad’s drug store, a tin of Bayer aspirin was 12 cents, and a pack of cigarettes 21 cents. Practically everyone smoked then. Seventy-six years later, at age 92, I’m still here.
Over 76 years, at $10 a month, I would have paid $9,120 to the insurance company and would have nothing to show for that “investment” other than that I am still here. That $9,120 today would buy a hundred-ounce bar of silver with some change left over. Since at age 18 silver was 85 cents an ounce and gold was $35, I do remember what silver and gold were 49 years later when I got into the precious metals business in the fall of 1977: silver was $1.25, and gold was $250 per ounce. Look what has happened in 49 years to metals prices, gasoline prices, milk, beef, bacon, tires, lumber, and everything else.My dad and mom bought a 40-acre farm with a lovely two-storey home and two barns, 45 miles south of Washington, D.C., for $9,500 in 1948. Gas, as I write this, is $2.89 a gallon; that farm is still there, and a million dollars couldn’t buy it.
On my 92nd birthday, on February 17th, a client of mine bought 20 100-ounce silver bars at $7,485 each, plus a half-percent commission, making it $150,456. This was $75.20 per ounce delivered. I looked through my receipts to see if anyone bought anything from me on my birthday a year ago, and I found that a man bought 600 ounces of one-ounce silver “Buffys” (as we call them) at $33.73, plus a 1% commission, for a total of $20,452.50, or $34 per ounce delivered including commission. In one year, silver delivered is $41.20 per ounce more, in exactly one year from February 17, 2025, to February 17, 2026.
I’ve said over and over again, I have no idea what will happen ten minutes from now, but basic Economics 101 says that economic history always repeats itself, and that means that all unbacked monies eventually go to zero. Translated, it means that your saved assets in dollars will eventually be worthless. In 100% of history, that will happen.
Since I was born in 1934, I just checked on the internet, and in the year of my birth, eggs were 33 cents a dozen, a loaf of white bread was 8 cents, a ten-pound bag of potatoes was 29 cents, and gas was 18 cents a gallon. In 92 years, dollars have gone down in value or purchasing power that much. Dollars will not go to zero as long as I live, but they have lost over 95% in my 92 years. If dollars have lost that much in 92 years, how many more years will be required for them to be declared absolutely worthless? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? I have no idea, but you young parents who put dollars aside for your beloved offspring are literally leaving them NOTHING. Why not leave them gold and silver, which when they grow up will have increased in dollar prices as the dollar has lost probably all of its value?
The title of this is simply “Insurance,” and a dictionary definition of that word is “protection against loss.” Since gold and silver go up in dollar prices as the dollar decreases in value—and all other things go up in dollar prices as the dollar loses value—gold and silver are literally “insurance against loss.” Just sitting there, not changing in appearance, with no government interference. Just sitting there, with no payments to make, as in a regular insurance policy. Just sitting there, protecting against loss, as insurance is supposed to do. How uninteresting or monotonous, as my dictionary calls boring. As a fire buff, I wish I could have witnessed an 11-alarm fire in the famous St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, N.Y., a few years ago. That wouldn’t have been boring, as metals sitting in a safe are.