Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is

episode 541. It's titled, Debasement Fears or Meme Fever, the Gold and Silver Rally. As I record this,

on Tuesday, October 14th, 2025, gold just hit another record high at $4,133 per ounce.

That's up 55% year to date, the best start of the year since 1979.

Silver has exceeded $50 per ounce, also a record of 65% year-to-date.

I saw a quote in the Financial Times this morning from Kenji Onuki. He lives in Japan. He's a 40-year-old

director of an architecture firm. He made his first purchase of gold ever, a gold bar. He said,

I thought it was important to have something that physically exist, something you can actually

hold in your hands. That quote reminds me of an episode we did back in 2021,

Own Something Real. This morning, as I ate breakfast, I was looking at

Bloomberg, and there was an article titled The Great Debasement Debate is rippling across

global markets. The idea of debasement is that the fiat currency is worth less over time compared to real things such as gold.

Now I've owned gold coins since early 2015 after I released episode 37 on gold. It was gold

without the hype and politics. We at last took a deep dive into the long-term bullish case for

gold in episode 431, which we released in May 2023. In that episode, I talked about how there was

more and more debt, more financialization, and a greater risk of contagion, a greater risk of a breakdown in

trust. And when bad things occur, people want to own something real, something simple, something

with history, and that's gold. Earlier this year, we released an episode with Max Belmont. This was

part of the FEG Insight Bridge series.

Max said that gold is the inverse of confidence. When investors are feeling less confident

about the world, they own gold. And that's what we've seen. There's a contagion right now.

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