They’re going to mint a Trump coin.
A $1 “gold” coin with the face of a sitting president on it. Except it isn’t gold. Doug called it exactly right on this week’s episode: a “pot metal coin” with “a sheen of a gold-like metal, probably bronze” on the face. His verdict: “It’s a phony bullshit coin, so that part’s appropriate anyway.”
Nobody will spend it. Nobody spent the last dollar coin either. I saw a few Sacagaweas in circulation years ago and then never again.
So it’s easy to laugh this off and scroll to the next headline. Don’t. The coin is telling you something, and Doug put his finger on exactly what.
“The Romans, before Augustus, minted coins with ideal images of a god or a virtue,” he said. “And it was only after it turned into an official empire that you put the face of a living person, an emperor, on the coins. And that’s what’s happening with us too.”
That’s Doug’s read, and it’s a sharp one. A republic stamps an idea on its money. An empire stamps a man.
The war you’re paying for
Doug and I spent most of the hour on Iran, because that’s where the money is going. And the numbers are obscene.
“Every Tomahawk missile costs $3 million for the missile alone,” Doug said, “not counting the ancillary costs of the ships or planes that deploy the things. That’s an expensive piece of hardware to blow up.”
Then the Patriots at roughly $4 million apiece. The JASSMs, the PrSMs, the HIMARS. The running estimate we kicked around was about $3 billion a day.
Let’s do the math you’re not supposed to do out loud.
$3 billion a day is $90 billion a month. On a war against a country that, as Doug put it, “presents no danger at all to us.” Against the backdrop of a government “literally running out of money.”
A government that has run out of money and needs $90 billion a month does not go find it. It prints it.
That is the part that reaches into your account. Not the missiles. The money made to pay for the missiles.
In a crisis like this, the response is always bigger than the event that triggered it. The war is loud and brief. The debasement that funds it is quiet and permanent.
The gold that may or may not be there
Which brings us to Fort Knox.
On the show I read Doug the quote from Treasury Secretary Bessent, word for word: “I’m happy to say all gold is present and accounted for. The US has the largest pile of gold in the world, over $1 trillion.”
Doug’s answer: “How does he know that? There hasn’t been an audit forever... He shouldn’t say things with certainty when there’s not been an audit. That’s why they have audits.”
He’s right. And it’s worse than a missing audit. What’s down there is largely coin melt from the 1930s, when Roosevelt confiscated Americans’ gold, melted the coins, and locked the bars away. The confiscation was the greatest theft in American history, and the pile it produced has been shrinking ever since. Bessent left that part out.
Use gold as the yardstick and the whole picture snaps into focus. The government tells you inflation is running around 3.8%. Then you look underneath the headline and find electricity prices up 23% year over year. One of those two numbers is measuring reality. It isn’t the official one.
That’s what Doug means by a “slow motion depression.” Not a 1929-style crash where everything falls off a cliff in a week. A grind. You stand still, and you lose 5 or 10% a year to the depreciation of the dollar. The price of your house, your car, your savings, your portfolio. Unless each is climbing faster than that, you’re going backward while the chart says you’re fine.
Credit where it’s due
I’ll say what I said on the show. Neither Doug nor I is a reflexive Trump hater. Doug still prefers him to the alternative, and so do I. And Trump has done real things, like suspending the Jones Act so the Gulf could keep California in diesel and gasoline. That should have happened decades ago.
The free market keeps quietly solving the problems the state creates. Tankers reroute. Supply finds a path. It never ceases to amaze me. But it’s solving those problems in spite of the money, not because of it.
What to do about it
So what do you actually do?
Doug’s answer was plain, and I don’t disagree with the direction. “I’m long both.” Oil and gas. Gold.
There are top-quality gold stocks yielding 5% or more, trading at eight or nine times earnings. The oil stocks are cheaper and, to my eye, better. That kind of value doesn’t sit around forever.
Own things that can’t be conjured on a keyboard. Keep a deliberate cash reserve, on purpose, so a crisis becomes your opportunity instead of your margin call. And don’t let the noise freeze you. I told Doug the markets feel as confusing as they’ve ever been. Oil that won’t behave, gold stocks that pulled back hard off the highs.
I could be wrong on the timing. Timing is always the hard part, and I hold my timing calls loosely. But the mechanism isn’t confusing at all. When a government is spending $90 billion a month it doesn’t have, on a war it can’t win, and putting the president’s face on a junk dollar while it does it, the yardstick tells you everything.
Read the coin. It’s pot metal. So is the promise behind it.
Have a great weekend, and go listen to the full conversation with Doug if you haven’t yet.
Best,
Matt Smith
