History has taught us that governments can take a perfectly good piece of paper, put some ink on it, and make it totally worthless. It happened in Hungary in 1946, Argentina in 1988 and more recently in Zimbabwe. But most currency devaluations go unnoticed by the general population until the rate of decline begins to gain momentum. It can be compared to a slow motion train wreck you just can’t keep your eyes off. This is certainly the case with US dollar, which has been in decline since the start of the Iraq war, and has gone from 80 cents to buy a euro to over $1.40 just recently. King World News interviewed Rob McEwen, former Founder and CEO of Goldcorp and current Chairman and CEO of US Gold. When asked about the possibility of hyperinflation occurring in the United States, Rob compared the US to Weimar Germany and stated:

“In January of 1919 you could buy one ounce of gold that was selling for $20 an ounce for 170 reichsmarks.  Four years later in November of 1923, to buy one ounce of gold you needed 87 trillion reichsmarks, now that’s twelve zeros.  And it doesn’t matter how much money you had in the bank, it was worthless if you left it in German marks.”

Rob McEwen continues:

“The consumer, the government and the corporations are loaded up with debt.  The tax base is weak, and we have one creditor that is very nervous, Asia.  China and Japan are looking at the issuance of currency, and the monetary expansion and saying to Washington, ‘You’ve got to slow down because the dollars we are holding, and we hold a lot of them, you’re making them worth less.’  And there could come a day when those lenders will say we will no longer accept the dollar, and you get into a situation where the government ends up and it has already started buying its own debt.”

Rob also discussed who gets hurt the most in hyperinflation, “When you look at what happened, the conservative, the prudent, the backbone of the nation, those are the people that are hurt the most...There’s a really big warning for everybody who is prudent and cautious and the savers of the country, that your money could become much less valuable in a very short period of time.  And it is necessary for you to go out and protect yourself, as you said Eric by buying gold and silver and other hard assets that will appreciate as the dollar, the euro, the pound all start heading towards zero.”

“The amount of stimulation required each time to get the economy going is larger than before, and the period between, or the duration of the recovery is shortened as we go down this road.  So, what we are seeing in the banks and what you’re seeing right now, this tug of war, first it was the dollar was in trouble and then Greece, Ireland and Spain, Portugal were all viewed as problems...Now Ireland is back in the picture, so money has flowed out of the dollar into the euro. Now people went oops I’m in the wrong currency, back into the dollar.”

When asked if this gold and silver bull market will end in a mania McEwen replied, “It will, you’ll see a slope, a very steep curve in terms of price.  I don’t think it will be any different than the tech or the real estate eras, and then there will be a re-writing of the system.”

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