Fed News Friday: Ron Paul waves “rebel silver” at Ben Bernanke during hearing

When I first heard the news that Texas Congressman Ron Paul waved a silver coin at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during his testimony at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, I was instantly excited to write this week’s Fed News Friday piece. While waving the coin at Bernanke, Rep. Paul lectured him about the importance of sound commodity-based money that holds its value over time, as opposed to paper and electronic fiat dollars that all-too-easily lose their value as the central bank issues more and more currency.

As he waved the one ounce silver coin, Paul said:

“You took over the Fed in 2006. I have a silver ounce here, and this ounce of silver back in 2006 would buy over four gallons of gasoline. Today, it will buy almost 11 gallons of gasoline. That’s preservation of value.”

I was thrilled to hear sound-money advocate Ron Paul use the same illustration we’ve been using here at Silver Circle, both on this blog and at our booth at conferences like CPAC: that the Federal Reserve’s fiat dollars are demonstrably losing their value over time because they buy less and less gasoline as the years go on and the printing presses hum, but stable commodities like gold and silver could buy the same amount of gasoline in 2000 as they did in 1950. Was it too much to hope that the most visible champion of sound money in the United States might be reading our blog? I was so excited to write this piece when I heard the news about the silver coin and the badly-needed lesson in monetary policy, but the next day all of us here at Silver Circle would learn something that absolutely floored us…

Read the rest of my article

at The Silver Underground.

Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
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