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(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on February 6, 2026.) When I look at how things are going, I keep coming to the conclusion that we might see $10 per gallon gasoline at your local pump pretty soon – maybe in 2027. It would cost $200 for a 20-gallon fillup. It might not happen, but if it did, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Basically, it would feel like a replay of the Oil Crisis of 1973. The basic reason for this is just the same as in 1973. Our currency, the dollar, is losing value. Already the penny is being disappeared, and I think the nickel is not far behind. It takes more and more dollars to buy things. We had a burst of “inflation” following the wild money-printing of the Covid period, in 2020-2021, which combined with “supply chain” and other issues to drive prices higher. But, if you look on YouTube, or in our own experience and that of those we know, many Americans seem to be experiencing another, maybe even bigger inflationary burst as prices rise again. Except for gasoline. It’s still at a level that we first saw in 2008, eighteen years ago. Gasoline prices are very politically sensitive. We can’t really have a public discussion about the price of a Big Mac, or apartment rent, or healthcare costs, because every situation is different. Gasoline prices are about the only price that is about the same everywhere, and every American knows what it is. It becomes a focal point for “inflation” that is affecting everything we buy. Every politician around the world wants to avoid having a discussion about the “inflation” that is one of the characteristics of our time. President Donald Trump, in 2025, leaned hard on OPEC oil producers to increase their production to near

A friend asked me about the “future of supply side economics.” The connotation, I think, was that after fifty years now, since the early days of the 1970s, we have done what could be done. Low Taxes and Stable Money. Rather, I see economics today — not just “supply side economics” but the entire field of study — as basically an unexplored continent. This is because, of the thousands of professional academic and other economists out there, almost none are doing anything to explore this vast continent. They are just bickering about the same stuff they’ve been bickering about for the past 100 years, most of it irrelevant. The great insight of the “supply side economists,” which as we know are really just “economists” in the Classical Tradition, was basically that everything matters. We have always known this, of course. AI, or regulations on car emissions, or regulations on bank lending, or immigration, or self-driving cars — all this matters. But, some things matter more than others. So you focus your attention, first and foremost, on the things that matter most, which is usually Low Taxes and Stable Money. But, you can also focus some attention on all the other things that matter. Today, I might say that Immigration matters more than taxes and money. August 11, 2016: The Gigantic Importance of Supply-Side Economics There are some economists who do focus on some narrow topic, like fisheries management or rent controls or the effects of minimum wage laws. But, the big macroeconomists ignore all of this, because it doesn’t fit into their mathematical models. One outcome of the misuse of math in economics, since the 1870s, is that it implies that nothing matters, unless it is represented by a letter variable. The very use of the equal sign, by definition

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on January 15, 2026.) Iran has been experiencing quite a bit of disorder recently. The reasons for this are “complicated” – Iran has many foreign enemies, and the situation smells like an attempted “color revolution” – but the government of Iran has also been making quite a mess of things all by itself, recently and for a long time now. It’s no surprise that even the most patriotic Iranians might be very dissatisfied today. The reason for this, as promoted on social media, is supposedly the “Islamists,” although Iran has been Islamic since the seventh century. The more likely reason is that Iran is also suffering a moderate hyperinflation, while also raising already-high taxes to intolerable levels. Iran’s currency, the rial, used to be fairly reliable. In 2003, it was about 8,000 rials to the dollar; and in 2011, it was about 10,000. A little slippage, but nothing too bad. But soon afterwards, the rial broke down. By 2019, it took 42,000 rials to buy a dollar. Then capital controls put foreign exchange on lockdown. In early 2026, it reportedly takes over 1.4 million rials to buy a dollar on the black market. Today’s rial is worth only about 1/140th of what it was worth in 2011.  According to the Iranian website Bonbast.com, the black market rate has moved from 800,000 to 1,400,000 (+75%) just since June 2025. The official “inflation rate” was 42.5% in December 2025, from a year earlier – but even this is considered a whitewashed government fiction. If I was an Iranian citizen, I would be rather unhappy about this. But it gets worse. The extreme inflation no doubt arises from Iran’s budget deficit of 5.5% of GDP in 2025, continuing a long series of deficits. Naturally, the government wants to resolve this, with higher

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on December 12, 2025.) In 2019, I was involved in a crypto project that aimed to provide a usable basis of large-scale commerce in an environment where existing fiat currencies were failing badly. Of course, I was in support of a 100% gold system – which has always worked in the past. And, people agreed that this was a good idea “theoretically,” and “eventually.” But, the perception at the time was that there should be some kind of intermediate step. For example, if a country had a regular gold-based currency today, then the value of the currency would be fixed to gold. In other words, foreign exchange rates with the other major fiat currencies would be terribly volatile, and also, would introduce a lot of trade and finance difficulties. Yes, you don’t want to follow those fiat currencies into the oblivion they deserve. But, you don’t want to beat yourself to death with forex chaos in the interim period either. The solution, in that 2019 project, was to have a currency with 40% Gold and 60% US Dollars, a proxy for the whole global fiat currency space, since all the major currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, others) tend to stay pretty close to one another to reduce forex volatility. In the future, maybe that 60% of fiat would devalue away to dirt, and you would be left with an effective gold-only currency. But for now, having one foot in both worlds seemed like the best solution. Recently, the BRICS consortium unveiled its plan for a similar solution, rather boringly called the “unit.” It is to be composed of 40% gold, and 60% of a basket of the domestic fiat currencies of the participating governments, including China, India, Brazil, Russia and so forth. For one thing, this allows the

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on November 7, 2025.) The BRICS – a consortium of eleven countries, with 22 more in application stages, led by China, Russia, India and Brazil – declared in October the building of a new “gold settlement architecture as a strategic safeguard against global financial volatility.” This is a fine goal, which can take many specific forms. The quickest and easiest way (although not necessarily the “best” way) to get this done is to introduce “gold checking accounts” at major existing financial institutions, that already have all the vast infrastructure needed to process payments on a large scale, and are already trusted by other big corporations. A “gold checking account” is an account, denominated in grams of gold, that you can use to make a payment to another “gold checking account.” This differs from a “gold savings account,” which only allows deposits and withdrawals by the account owner. With such a “gold checking account,” using all the usual existing bank infrastructure including ACH transfers, wire transfers, SWIFT, debit cards, checks etc., you can make payments for goods and services, and provide the necessary infrastructure for things like gold-denominated bonds. The term “checking account” is somewhat American; in British English, this is known as a “current account.” Many of the big existing banks in the BRICS realm already have “gold savings accounts,” denominated in gold, but which do not apparently allow payments to other accounts. Banks with such “savings accounts” include the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; Russia’s Sberbank; the State Bank of India, and the Saudi National Bank.  Monkey-see monkey-do is the general way things get done, so it would be useful if there was an example to follow, a big bank that not only had a “gold savings account,” but also a “gold checking account” that allowed payments to other gold checking

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on October 26, 2025.) The “BRICS” is now a consortium of ten countries, with 22 more countries in application stages, led by Russia, China and India. Events since 2022 have lit a fire under the BRICS members to establish a new global financial and currency architecture that is wholly independent of the US dollar system, which has been the main focus since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. At Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes introduced the idea of some kind of global floating fiat currency system, based on the “bancor,” and managed through a proposed International Clearing Union. But other countries, including the United States, threw up on that idea. Who, exactly, was going to manage this “bancor” and “International Clearing Union”? And when they screwed up, again, how would they be replaced? For literally thousands of years, the only thing that served as money throughout the world were the precious metals – gold and silver – and after the 1870s, gold alone. The Bretton Woods arrangement was based on gold. They came to the same conclusion as President James Madison laid out more than a century earlier: The only adequate guarantee for the uniform and stable value of a paper currency is its convertibility into specie [gold]—the least fluctuating and the only universal currency. Recently, the BRICS themselves had a similar sort of discussion, and many proposals were laid forth that involved some kind of supranational floating fiat currency, or possibly, a currency basket based on the domestic floating fiat currencies of the BRICS members. But these currencies themselves have had such a dismal track record (Russia, Brazil, India, South Africa …) that nobody got very excited about being tied to this grab-bag of losers. They were certainly not the “least fluctuating and only universal currency.” Just as at Bretton Woods, the only thing