Hi, everyone. I'm executive editor Steve Ehrlich, and I'm here today with Willem Bauter.

Willem is a longtime practitioner in the financial space. He was a member of the UK's MPC,

which is basically the equivalent of the FOMC here. He's a former chief economist at City

and has had a long distinguished history

career in the financial industry. So welcome, Willem. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Let's get

right into it. You run an op-ed in the financial times a couple of weeks ago. They really kind of

caught my eye. And basically, the gist of it was that

central banks should, quote, unquote, get out of the gold game. You started it by pointing out,

I guess, your belief that gold is in what you call it, I believe, a 6,000-year bubble. And I think

that's a great place to start. Can you just explain what you meant by that? Gold is valued mostly for the belief that it is a good store of value. It has very few intrinsic

services that it yields. Either as a consumption good. Yes, I can hang jewelry around my neck,

but much of the jewelry even is viewed as an investment rather than something done for its beauty itself.

And of course there's some uses in dentistry, some advanced technology that made use of gold, but it basically has very little

intrinsic value. So this $4,000 plus value that they see today is that high simply because

people believe it will be a valuable store of value.

And these beliefs, self-fulfilling, anything is fragile.

It's very much like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin actually has a proper use, she wants, as a means of payment,

often for illegal transactions, of course, but that makes

a desirable. Gold used to be, back in the Middle Ages and before, 3,000 G.S. BC, viewed as a

means of payment, they have a store of value. But nobody really these days exchanges gold that they go to the shop.

So gold's value is what people think it will be. And that is incredibly fragile support for the

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