by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
It is a fair thing to say that without certain people there would be no Gold Goats ‘n Guns. When the editor of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, passed on I tried to explain how important he was to me.
I kept that article pinned on my Twitter feed for more than 3 years.
Alongside Raimondo’s fierce wit and opprobrium for all things war, there was “Mr. Gold,” Jim Sinclair.
Sinclair spoke clearly about the reality of how capital markets operated from a veteran insider’s perspective.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
If Antiwar.com was required reading every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because of Raimondo, JSMineset.com was required reading every day because Jim was indefatigable posting everything he considered important to the national and global balance sheet problems the world faced.
We ‘gold bugs’ of the time checked it then like we check Zerohedge today. ZH was born from the Sinclair blueprint.
Combing the Weeds for Gold
I spent hours in the theoretic weeds of Mises.org, Lewrockwell.com, and around the early days of the gold ‘podcast’ space. We didn’t call them that then.
Eric King, Jim Puplava, and Jay Taylor stood next to talks from Walter Block, Murray Rothbard, and Joe Salerno in filling my days while I toiled in a makeshift lab in an industrial park perfecting my odd character of one part monetary theorist, two parts rabid hockey fan, and three parts mad scientist.
You can imagine how close to the “Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours” I got to during the 2008 financial crisis alone. But without Jim Sinclair none of it would have made one lick of practical sense.
While everyone else spoke from outside the monetary system, in theoretical terms, Jim talked about the events unfolding in real time with the authority of the insider’s insider.
Here was the ultimate maverick. And everyone who knew him said as much.
This was the guy trying to get us past the punters and the sellers, the book talkers and the ideologues. Jim, in his elliptical way, tried to explain what was happening and why. He lifted the roof off the Wall St. sausage factory because he was clearly disgusted with how the recipes were changing.
Jim wasn’t an Austrian, or a Keynesian, or a Monetarist. He was a trader and an observer. He knew the limitations of all of those disciplines. But until the end, he was the guy who understood the basic math of the problems we faced then and were building for today.
Equally, he understood the plumbing of how the money flowed. Because of this he understood the centrality of gold to fixing the balance sheet problems facing the world.
If you don’t believe me, here’s an interview from 2020 that should prove that point:
And we should all wish to be half this sharp at 80, folks.
He taught us that their main tool was perception, hand-waving. The world practiced MOPE – Management of Perspective Economics — not any “ism” like capitalism or communism. And they did it badly, I might add. It gets even worse when you realize they also practice MOPP (MOPPolitics).
He was Zoltan Poszar before Poszar was Poszar. He had the same basic quality that Poszar possesses, the desire to teach, to illuminate. Jim wasn’t a natural teacher, he got better as time went along. He put in his second 10,000 hours to JSMineSet until he couldn’t anymore.
And he inspired that desire to teach in the rest of us.
That’s how you knew he wasn’t a gatekeeper or controlled opposition. He published Armstrong’s hand-written reports Marty produced while in prison for defying Wall St. He taught us about derivatives, credit default swaps, non-recourse financing. He held our hands through Lehman Bros., MF Global, and Bear Stearns.
I emailed him a few times over the years. He always answered with truly thoughtful responses to my questions.
He tried to teach us how to trade. Jim made great call after great call. Not all of them were right. No one gets every trade right. Get the big ones right, however he reminded us, and the little losses take care of themselves.
