 Hello, I am Mark Thornton and this is another episode of Minor Issues. This week financial commentators were talking about the NASDAQ Stock Index returning to a bull market, but I want to look at gold. Midweek gold was approaching an all-time high of over $2,000 and really we only have about a couple of percentage points to go to set an all-time record high gold price in terms of US dollars. Our dollar does not represent silver, it doesn't represent real money anymore since Nixon took us off of the gold standard in 1971. But gold was really an important critical part of our monetary system for hundreds or thousands of years because it was shipped from country to country and region to region to balance out the international balance of payments and to keep the world on a global monetary equilibrium. Now of course it also kept our budget of the national government balanced and it helped keep us out of war. But that is something we've given up by going off the gold standard. When we went off the gold standard it was really the Brenton Woods standard where the US dollar was defined in terms of gold. But during the 1960s the government spent too much. We were fighting the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the war on poverty and all of that spending needed to be paid for by printing money and of course foreigners didn't want our paper money so they redeemed it in terms of gold and President Nixon was forced to shut down what's called the gold window in 1971. It's important to note that prior to this of course the gold price was fixed and we were on a very long term pattern of equilibrium or stability in terms of the price of gold and if we look at subsequently to going off of the gold standard we see great initial instability with the price of gold going from $35 up to $150 and then back to $100 in a couple of years and then when inflation was continuing on in the 1970s the price of gold skyrocketed to $850 an ounce and it looked like it was going ever higher but President Carter and Chairman Volcker raised interest rates to as high as 18% and that broke the back of inflation. They stopped printing. They crushed the economy and that was good enough to create a gold equilibrium price or range at least for the next 20 years and it was only until the early 2000s and the first decade of the new millennium where the Fed returned to inflation, created a housing bubble and the price of gold went up over 600%. In the second decade of the new millennium a new equilibrium price was established and it's really a range, a wide range of around $1,200 and that lasted until recently mid 2019 if you had only known what was going to happen subsequently to the middle of 2019 you would be a very rich person. In one year we had reached a new all-time high in the price of gold over $2,000 an ounce. This would level off but one year later we had another run at the top, run at an all-time high just one year ago actually and where we are right now is no big surprise, we're back near those all-time highs. So the main point here is that gold itself is very stable and it's really the monetary system that is causing instability in the gold price, it's monetary chaos in essence that is creating the instability in the gold price and has us perched here at an all-time high level.