Transcript
David Asman: Well, the Fed announced it will continue pumping money into the economy, while the leaders in Washington still can’t balance the budget. Our next guest spent years battling policies like these when he was a Congressman, will his legacy live on? Joining me now on a Fox Business exclusive is the man, the legend, former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, it’s great to hear from you, how are you and what have you been doing with your time since you left Congress.
Ron Paul: Just waiting on your call. I’m delighted to hear from you.
David Asman: We’re going to call everyday from now, you’re going to get sick of it.
Ron Paul: I’ve been pretty busy travelling and talking about … what are the things I talk about? I talk about the Fed, the economy, the fixing of the interest rates and all of the bizarre things that we’ve been living with, and why the Fed helped us run up that deficit and all those kinds of things that I think you’ve heard about.
David Asman: One thing that you haven’t been doing, unfortunately, is grilling Ben Bernanke like you used to do when you were a House member. And there was one classic exchange between you and Ben Bernanke, let’s just play the exchange and then I want to get you to it and current events. Play the exchange.
Ron Paul: Do you think gold is money?
Ben Bernanke: No, it’s a precious metal.
Ron Paul: It’s been money for 6,000 years, somebody reversed that and eliminated that economic law.
Ben Bernanke: Well, it’s an asset. Would you say treasury bills are money, I don’t think they’re money, either.
David Asman: So Ben Bernanke doesn’t think gold is money or a currency. But when you look at what happened in Cyprus, where the government was considering – and it still may do it, to some extent – going into your bank accounts and literally confiscating money that you have already earned and already paid taxes on, don’t you think that more people in the world are going to think of gold as money?
Ron Paul: Absolutely, and that’s the nature of government. When they get into trouble, they try to raise taxes, which is confiscation, but this is a little bit more blatant in the way they were doing it. But I’m just wondering what’s going to happen, whether they’re even going to open up those banks again. Instead of arguing whether they’re going to take 6% or 10%, they might be arguing, “When are we ever going to not open up these banks again”. So I’m sure it will happen, but I’m not amused by these kinds of things, it happened in the depression and at different times. In the ultimate test gold is money, not because I say its money, but because history has proven that. And if you really want to know the ultimate money, think of the countries that get into trouble and people try to leave their borders. You think you can give a paper dollar or a paper currency to bribe somebody at the border? No, you need gold, because gold is the ultimate money.
David Asman: Today, Ben Bernanke was been questioned a lot about QE2 and bond purchasing, about printing money to purchase government bonds, which, of course, helps the politician to pay for things he doesn’t have money for. But that idea of Quantitative Easing is running out of juice, and even people who have been supportertive of Bernanke are saying so now. Do you think that that policy might change in the coming months??
Ron Paul: It’s going to change, but not because they want to do it deliberately. Because, let’s say if today he would have announced, “We have a new policy. We think we have overdone it and we are going to gradually withdraw, we’re only going to buy 80 next month and 50 the next month”. I think that would have panicked the stock market. What we’re witnessing now is the result of this wild Quantitative Easing, pumping all the money into the bonds and the stocks, and at the same time we have 50,000 people in New York City that are homeless, we have 48 million people on food stamps. And free market economists claim, and I tend to believe them, that the real unemployment rate is probably close to 22%. So this pumping and Quantitative Easing has not solved our problems.
David Asman: Well, you mentioned the stock market, obviously it has helped the stock market go to greater heights, because if you feed free money to the stock market, they love it, they can borrow at no interest rates and make more money on deals, etc. But sometimes a company’s stock will go higher when they fire people, that happened recently with American Express, they fired thousands of people and their stock went up 5% – 6% in one day. Doesn’t trying to prop up the stock market contradict Ben Bernanke’s policy of keeping unemployment down?
Ron Paul: Yes, and I think there are two reasons for stocks to go up, one might be because the company is cleaning up its act and maybe firing people they don’t need, or there’s just a lot of money there participating in a bubble, such as with houses or with stocks, especially like the NASDAQ bubble. But that’s where the money is going, and fixing the price of money is the big deal. Many a times I watch these press releases and am fascinated with them where they go down second by second, and what is the announcement? On probably the most important price in the whole world, and most economist declare, “We don’t believe in price fixing”, but this is price fixing at its worse and everybody hangs on that, Wall Street hangs on it, and yet it’s completely foreign to the free market.
David Asman: Dr. Paul, we only have about 20 seconds, but as I said, people around the world realize the currency is not where they want to put their trust anymore. When you can look at Cyprus and you can look at what’s happening here, do you think the voters might turn back to a gold standard or something where the currency used is worth its weight in gold?
Ron Paul: I really think so, because that’s what history has shown, that ultimately once the government destroys its currency, they have to go back to something more trustworthy than a politician’s promise. And I go to a lot of campuses, and the younger generation are very much attuned to this, because I think they understand monetary policy a lot better than my generation did when we were in college.
David Asman: Dr. Ron Paul, it’s always great to have you, we will call you more frequently. By the way, how’s your son doing, is there anything you disagree with him on?
Ron Paul: I think he’s catching on pretty well, I think he’s doing great.
David Asman: Are you for his immigration policy?
Ron Paul: I haven’t got a hold of that yet, I’ve written my policy up, and I think it does pick up a lot from my book “Liberty defined”, I have a whole chapter in that. It’s not an easy subject for anybody to deal with, but it will be interesting to see how that shapes out.
David Asman: It’s a tough nut. Dr. Ron Paul, good to see you, thanks a lot.
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Ultimately, the greatest value is in a life lived with integrity, peace, and contentment. On a material level though, even gold has its ups and downs. The bible (earths oldest and best respected history book) supports gold and silver as the standard of exchange value. Yet inflation still can occur with gold, as in the flood of gold at the discovery and looting of the Americas, and at the Roman looting of the Jewish temple in year 70. Increased supply equals lower value. And don’t forget the prophecy of gold and silver being discarded in the streets, presumably in times of severe famine, when the biggest value is in food.
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Paul Krugman dislikes this video.
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Ron Paul is the ultimate warrior.
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“Ron Paul My President” this is what i had a print shop make to go on the back of my jeep.
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That ‘s my President
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Look up bitcoin. It’s an idea that’s way ahead of it’s time. Bitcoin is a virtual currency that passes the scarcity test because it is virtually “mined” by a solving a difficult computer problem. Unlike gold mining, the only environmental impact is the power to run servers to solve this problem. It’s also completely decentralized, open-source and unable to be printed at will by a government.
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I voted Paul in the primary, Johnson (L) in the general election.
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Ron Paul wants currency backed by commodities- he often points to gold and its track record, but he also pushes for other commodities- the US used to (might still) have the worlds largest supply of helium, we have large supplies of almost every element actually in case of war or unique uses are found for them. Not all the eggs in the basket would be gold. Our national parks should not be our debts collateral covering fiat currency that we all depend on. That is scarier then transmutation.
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Gold has many uses, its antibacterial- good electrical and thermal properties, in many ways silver is the same and used in bandages and electrical contacts, most of the silver ever mined has already been lost to these types of products. If we could make more gold- we would use it more, the market could control the price better then govt. This however is all a bit of a distraction from the point though (continued in reply to this comment)
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The same problems would plague us under silver and gold. The real problem is the allocation of resources by our puppet governments. Where would we get all that silver and gold anyways? If we declare our currency of no value, why would somebody trade us gold for it? We’d have to barter things of real value for it to the few people who dominate the gold inventories. That would drive the price of gold to astounding heights.
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Its sad.
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Its sad.
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Look up the characteristics of good currency. Sea shells fail the scarcity test. Literally anyone could scoop buckets and buckets of sea shells. Would that make them any wealthier? No. Mining gold, on the other hand is expensive and time-consuming. It could very well be that a good farmer could sell his crops for better profit than a mine-owner. Thus the free market sets price.
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Gold and silver was the peoples money which was chosen after years of barter in the marketplace they settled on it. Under weights and measures it was used then governments came in and took over by adding their face on the money and then replacing it with paper. Gold and silver is a great store of value, easy to recognize and people used it. Paper money only benefits the bankers and governments and the people are left losing the value of their savings. Gold and Silver is the opposite.
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We need a Ron Paul in every state government and every government entity in washington.
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mate, at the end of the day, what did the romans consider as money, what did they coin? Which metals? the answer is silver and gold, that’s all Ron Paul is saying, ensure a currency’s legitimacy by using a tangible accepted commodity, which has been gold for thousands of years. As you say however, all commodities are worth something, just not universally accepted as “the currency of choice” as gold is
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I think Dr. Paul was refering to times of crisis, such as European Jews paying for transit in gold and jewels to escape the Nazis, or South Vietnamese being allowed to leave by paying five teals of gold, no substitutes accepted.
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["poverty existed long before fiat currency"]
In this modern era, it doesn’t have to.
["it has more to do with the fact that people continue to reproduce despite not having the 'proper' resources available."]
>Malthusian Detected< Then you’ll have to explain to me how we got this far, or why you think it can’t get into the trillions.
["unless they can exchange it with somebody else for things they actually want."]
Any country on EARTH would prefer payment in gold.
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["poverty existed long before fiat currency"]
In this modern era, it doesn’t have to.
["it has more to do with the fact that people continue to reproduce despite not having the 'proper' resources available."]
>Malthusian Detected< Then you’ll have to explain to me how we got this far, or why you think it can’t get into the trillions.
["unless they can exchange it with somebody else for things they actually want."]
Any country on EARTH would prefer payment in gold.
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he puts a large emphasis on gold. at 2:14 he says history has proven that gold is money. history has proven far more than gold to be money, which includes fiat.he then brings up that you couldn’t trade one nation’s currency at the border for the other, that you would use gold. this is patently false. you could use *anything* that the person would be willing to accept, including gold, food, drugs, or pesos. he is right about the danger of QE being used to prop up the bond and stock market, though
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Why don’t we do sea shells? Then it wouldn’t be limited to the mega rich who can afford to create or obtain it raw. Is gold our strength here in the US? Maybe we’d be better off mining some other metal or combination of metals? How are we going to crowd them out to curb the excessive spending and wasted opportunities?
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RON PAUL is our President.
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RON PAUL is our President.
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As long as there is no monopoly, there isn’t a problem. There are so many sources, that it would be realistically impossible for anyone to obtain every one. Thus, theft by inflation is also impossible.
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What about guarding against over mining, transmutation, and anything else I don’t know about.
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Ultimately everything is a commodity. “Money” is merely the most tradable (and therefore most desirable) commodity. We’re still using a barter system, except most of us have agreed to use a certain commodity as a standard of value. Currently that commodity is a piece of paper. It has no real value, but it has illusory value because we’ve all agreed to the government’s fiat declaration. At its core, the gold standard isn’t about inherent usefulness, it’s about preventing theft through inflation.
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It’s conductivity makes it useful, there’s a bunch of it on this computer. Our US labs come up with way more awesome stuff all the time. I think people are overbuying on that premise. Thanks, I’ll have another cup.
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If you want to buy and sell gold as a commodity, that’s fine. Why not leave it as a commodity and keep the prices low so we can enjoy the indirect benefits of industrial uses for gold? If paper products are a suitable form of exchange, why not use it? I think the real weakness in confidence is the FED source. As for me, I’d rather have a cup of coffee than something I’d have no immediate use for.
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Jarrett Mattson, gold is one of the rarest elements in the universe. It’s the most electrically conducive metal known to man, and lasts many years without decay. It has been used as currency for thousands of years, and has outperformed almost every single stock in the last 15 years in dollar terms. Maybe you should have another cup of coffee.
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so the ole, Kick the Can, and the Hell with the Kids” song eh? Love that..
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THATS HOW THY DEFEATED RON PAUL. BY STEALING
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WHATS INTERESTING TO ME IS THE FACT THAT DURING HIS CAMPAIGN NO ONE WANTED TO HEAR FROM HIM NOW LOOK. HE WAS MY PRESIDENT AND IN MY EYES HE IS MY PRESIDENT I JUST WISH HE WOULD HAVE ONE THE REPUBLICAN VOTE TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT BUT JUST LIKE HOW BUSH BEAT GORE
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Rand Paul 2016!
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Are you trying to use the principle of supply and demand to prove that coffee is more valuable than gold? I think you need to study the principle of supply and demand again. Oh, and check current exchange rates of coffee and gold too. That might help too.
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Sure you all can ridicule me and thumb me down, but nobody wants to talk economics. Who are the real sheeple?
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