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Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: There have long been rumors that Russia or China would create a gold-backed currency, but there was never a formal acknowledgment… until recently.

The Russian government recently stated:

“The BRICS countries are planning to introduce a new trading currency, which will be backed by gold.”

Analysts expect a formal announcement at the next BRICS summit in Johannesburg in the coming weeks.

What is your take?

Doug Casey: Let’s try to parse the words in the statement. In particular, the use of the word “trading.” I’m not sure what the difference between a “trading currency” and an ordinary currency might be. My guess is that it would only be used for settling accounts internationally. Also, if it’s going to be backed by gold, where will that gold be held? Will the amount of this currency—let’s call it the BRIC—that different governments get be based only upon the amount of gold that they have in their treasury? And will the currency be just for governments, or will it be available to companies or the average guy?

It’s unlikely to be of use to the average guy. In the first place, they won’t be printing 100 BRIC (or whatever they’ll call it) notes in this age of CBDCs. Allowing its use by the plebs would give them entirely too much freedom to take their assets across borders. Remember that almost all the countries talking about replacing the dollar now have crappy “blocked “currencies that are essentially worthless outside their home countries. My guess is that the new BRIC will be for international settlement only, just so they don’t have to use the dollar. Citizens will still have to use their crappy national currencies domestically.

There’s a basic question we have to ask ourselves, one that everyone is forgetting: Why is this new currency “backed” by gold in the first place? Why not simply use gold?

In other words, why have a government middleman there to call some amount of gold a “franc,” a “ruble,” a ‘pound,” a “dollar,” or whatever? Who needs some untrustworthy intermediary to give you paper? Why not just allow everybody to use gold itself, the world’s only historically successful money? The only reason for a currency is because they’re planning on manipulating it, which means inflating it at some point.

Of course, it will be nominally backed by gold to start with – it has to be, because none of these governments trust each other. But who among them can be trusted to store and redeem the gold? Nobody. That guarantees that although it might start out well because somebody says it’s redeemable and limited in quantity, it’ll eventually fall apart.

International Man: While the details remain unknown, how do you expect a potential BRICS gold-backed currency to work in practice?

What does this mean for the US dollar?

Doug Casey: I’m all for anything that gets the world off the dollar standard. The fact the dollar is accepted everywhere allows the US government to do all kinds of things—almost all of them stupid and destructive—that it wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. Roughly $800 billion dollars are exported annually. That trade deficit has been going on for over 40 years. It’s artificially raised the standard of living of Americans. It’s made them think government economic policy is wise. Which it isn’t. Decades of accumulated offshore dollars will someday—soon—come back home. Many trillions of dollars will be traded for real wealth in the US; prices will skyrocket, and the standard of living will collapse.

Since the early ’80s, the major US export has not been Boeings or wheat, or computers. It’s been dollars. Who knows how many scores of trillions of dollars are outside the US now? Foreigners only use the dollar because it’s traditionally accepted and convenient. Americans use it because they must, as “legal tender.” At some point, foreigners will dump the dollar for any number of reasons. It’s a time bomb waiting to go off.

It’s nice to see an alternative currency developing. But none of the governments involved—the Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, and 30 or 40 little players so far—have any reason to trust each other or the BRICS currency. I think it will fall apart.

It might do better than the euro initially. As I’ve often said, if the dollar is an “I owe you nothing,” the euro is a “who owes you nothing,” With the proposed BRIC, at least somebody’s theoretically got some gold available for redemption. But at least the euro is used by individuals and has paper notes. The BRIC won’t be used by tens of millions of individuals to help keep it stable. The BRIC is unlikely to be used for anything but accounting between governments.

They should just use gold itself—honest, uncomplicated, non-political money.

Every currency in the world is a fiat unit, backed by nothing but faith and habit, backed by nothing except the force of a government to make it legal tender.

The dollar is just—for the moment—the most accepted currency.

International Man: “We should expect over time a gradually increased share of other assets in reserve holdings of countries.”

“It’s possible to have more than one reserve currency.”

These are the recent words of Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Their remarks strongly hint that the current international monetary system based on the US dollar is on its way out… and soon.

Even the elites running this 50+ year-old system can’t go along with the farce of maintaining it anymore.

What is your view?

Doug Casey: Yellen and Powell are said to be economists. In fact, they are not economists. An economist is somebody who describes the way the world works in going about its business of producing and consuming. That’s not what these people attempt to do. They try to prescribe the way they think the world ought to work by creating more dollars.

Perhaps they finally see the writing on the wall. With the annual interest on the US now crossing the $1 trillion level, even they can see that the US government has to borrow money just in order to pay the interest on its debt. That means it’s pretty much “game over.”

So yes, there will soon be more than one reserve currency. The world will have to go back to gold simply because these governments are congenitally irresponsible and unsound. They have no reason to trust each other. They’re all inflating their currencies. They’re all bankrupt. The dollar is on its way out.

What’s going to replace the dollar? I don’t think it’s going to be the BRICs currency. Or the euro. It’s going to be gold itself. The problem is that these governments might try to make gold something that is just used between themselves for trade as opposed to something that the average guy can keep in his pocket. That would give them vastly less control and individuals entirely too much freedom.

International Man: Given everything we’ve discussed, what are the best ways to get positioned for prudence and profit?

Doug Casey: Well, it’s very clear that gold is moving back into the international monetary system after many decades of being viewed as an ancient foible or a pet rock. There’s actually no alternative other than primitive barter for international commerce.

Since there are only six or perhaps seven billion ounces of gold in the world—less than an ounce for every person on the planet—chances are that there’s going to be much more demand for gold both from individuals and from governments and all entities in between as national currencies collapse. So even though, at this moment, gold is now reasonably priced relative to everything else in the world—houses, clothes, food—I nonetheless think it’s likely to go much higher. It’s a refuge from chaos, and chaos is in the cards.

To answer to your question: Buy physical gold coins and keep most of them in your own possession. Also, to speculate on further increases in the price of gold, buy well-selected mining stocks. In past gold bull markets, they have moved upwards 10 to one, with some individual stocks moving up 100 to one or even 1,000 to one over the course of a few years.

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In this rare message, legendary gold investor Doug Casey shows you the secret to how he invests and the most lucrative “insider” way of multiplying your gold mining stock returns. Click here to see it now.

The good folks at Racket News and Public (Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, et al.) recently dumped the entire cache of slack messages between several scientists assembled to ‘get to the bottom’ of how Sars-CoV-2 emerged. While the group clearly thought it was a lab-leak at first, it’s obvious that they succumbed to political pressure – and became more concerned over optics than simply admitting “it could have also come from the lab, we dunno.”

Dr. Kristian Andersen, from Scripps Research, speaks at a hearing with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Capitol Hill on July 11, 2023 in Washington, DC. Members of the committee met to hear testimony from medical researchers on the origins of Covid-19. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

One of the scientists featured prominently in the Slack messages, Dr. Kristian Andersen, has hit back – calling the release of these communications “a conspiracy theory.”

As Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger note in Public (where one can download full versions of slack and email exchanges between the scientists).

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The three of us and Matt Taibbi of Racket spread “conspiracy theories” and engaged in “quote mining” for our Tuesday scoop, “Top Scientists Misled Congress About Covid Origins, Newly Released Emails And Messages Show,” according to Kristian Andersen, the scientist who was the main subject of our article. The only thing his messages revealed, Andersen said, was “Scientists doing science and having private conversations.” (Andersen did not respond to our requests for comment.)

“None of this is surprising  — the surprising part is that ‘journalists’ and others keep falling for the same bullshit,” wrote Andersen. 

But his emails and Slack messages show that there was nothing theoretical about his conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen makes clear in his messages that the purpose of the “Proximal Origin” paper was to “disprove,” in his words, the lab leak hypothesis. It was a propaganda exercise, not a scientific one. 

The documents that Public and Racket were the first to report on show Andersen and his co-authors, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, conspiring — by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and — to spread disinformation. Their conspiracy included coordinating with their “higher-ups” in the US and UK governments to deceive journalists, including a New York Times reporter.

Our reporting led several people sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis to demand the release of all the emails and Slack messages. “This calls for more transparency,” tweeted Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Times, “rather than selective, partial releases —especially since the messages imply coordinated efforts for manipulating journalists etc…”

We agree and are thus happy today to release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential “Proximal Origin,” paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the US government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. 

The messages vindicated researchers like the Broad Center’s Alina Chan, who coauthored a major book, Viral: The Search For Covid’s Origin, with British science journalist Matt Ridley, who Public interviewed for a podcast last month.

 “It’s ironic,” Chan told Public, “that these scientists who wanted to shut down conspiracy theories ended up starting their own conspiracy to prematurely dismiss a lab origin of Covid-19. Whether intentionally or not, their actions have steered a large portion of journalists and other scientists away from asking reasonable questions about how the pandemic started.”

Jamie Metzl, Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, another long-time supporter of the lab leak hypothesis, tweeted, “While the @nytimes was blindly and unquestioningly following the lead of the Proximal Origin authors [Andersen et al.] re #COVID19 origins, those scientists were scheming to manipulate NYT coverage. It’s time for the NYT to review its disastrous coverage of the pandemic origins issue.”

The New York Times, and other mainstream news reports, might start by reviewing these takeaways from our Tuesday scoop:

The scientists never really blamed the pangolins

The authors blamed pangolins in “Proximal Origin” even though they said, privately, that they were not convinced pangolins were a likely intermediate host between bats and humans. 

Here’s what Andersen et al. wrote in “Proximal Origin”: “The presence in pangolins of an RBD [receptor binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.” 

Here’s what Andersen said shortly before the “Proximal Origin” pre-print was published: “For all I know, people could have infected the pangolin, not the other way.” Said Andersen the day after the pre-print: “Clearly none of these pangolin sequences was the source though.” 

Scientists thought lab leak was “Friggin’ likely”

The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

Scientists thought lab leak was possible months after saying otherwise 

The messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a full month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint. “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16. “We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” As we noted on Tuesday, if Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in his paper?

“I’m dismissing him” said top scientist about Times reporter

The scientists attempted to deliberately misdirect a New York Times veteran science journalist, Donald McNeil. When approached by McNeil with questions about a possible lab leak, members of the Slack channel coordinated with each other to lead him away from the theory. “It would be prudent to continue to pre-think responses” to McNeil, Garry suggested. Andersen told his fellow authors that one of his replies to McNeil “includes humor to deflect from the fact that I’m dismissing him.” 

Scientists suspected the Bat Lady of the lab leak

The scientists were specifically discussing experiments being performed in the lab of Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady of China,” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s the same lab where three researchers became sick with Covid-like symptoms in 2019. Andersen discussed some of her papers in early February, and noted his concerns about gain-of-function experiments on MERS and SARS viruses. in mid-April he noted that Shi’s work was “the main reason I have been so concerned about the ‘culture’ scenario.” Cell culturing is a method through which viruses can be passed multiple times through cells in order to render them more infectious, and is exactly the kind of “laboratory-based scenario” the authors ruled out in their paper. 

The scientists’ conspiracy was driven by obedience to “higher-ups” in US and UK governments

The scientists were responding to “higher-ups.” Although the identities of these “higher-ups” remain to be further investigated, the new documents and Congressional interviews suggest that the “higher ups” may be Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome trust, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, government agencies, and/or the intelligence community. 

The New York Times and Washington Post have yet to cover the conspiracy by Andersen and his colleagues to misinform the public. But whatever they decide to do, the question is why Public, Racket, and intrepid reporters like Lee Fang keep getting the big scoops and they don’t. 

After all, we have broken some of the biggest stories in the world over the last several months, from the Twitter Files and the global crackdown on free speech to Covid’s origins to FBI and UAP whistleblowers. Often, our stories are confirmed days or weeks later by much larger news media companies and even U.S. Senators. Taibbi has done more than anyone to uncover the disinformation of the Censorship Industrial Complex, while Fang exposed how the FBI helps the Ukrainian government censor ordinary American citizens on Facebook. 

Public, Racket, Fang, and other small fry like us shouldn’t be scooping news behemoths. The New York Times had over $2.2 billion in revenue last year, which is over 2,200 times more revenue than Public will have in 2023. All combined, Public, Racket, and Fang have fewer than 12 employees. Why, then, do we keep scooping the Times, the Post, and other major media outlets? 

To answer that question, it’s important to understand why the New York Times pushed out Don McNeil, the reporter who Andersen et al. conspired to deceive.

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The last word goes to Matt Taibbi, who writes in Racket News;

Public has just published the cache of communications of the scientists who penned the key article, The Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2, that was used to dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 was caused by a lab accident. Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, and the rest of the staff of Public can’t be commended enough for doing the hard work to get this material out — you can find it linked here — and I strongly recommend that anyone with time read the docs from start to finish.

If you read the documents up at Public like a novel, and follow the chorus-like Slack exchanges between the four key scientists as a drama with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s hard to miss the brutal lesson. Four people whose job was to divine truth through scientific analysis were waylaid by social and political considerations that you can see attacking each of the characters with ferocity, even in their little digital haven of a private chat. With everything on the line, and millions of lives at stake, they were not only unable in the end to say what they really thought, but as my partner Walter Kirn points out, they joined up with a mechanism that worked to suppress and stamp out the very thoughts they themselves first had.

The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.

As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it. That’s what these scientists were risking when they played around with a lie this big: everything. They may not have been evil exactly — “more Three Stooges than Ocean’s Eleven” is how one scientist put it to me — but their bumbling inability to find their consciences under pressure in the first months of 2020 might end up having lasting consequences, for society and science. In any case, conceding that in media we get lost in the moment a lot and often think what’s happening today is far more important than what happened yesterday, what they have over at Public is historic stuff. I hope you find time to discover it for yourselves.