Alasdair Macleod returns as our main guest and Michael Hopley, the President and CEO of Alpha Exploration, introduces an exciting new gold mining story that your host is covering in his newsletter. The first ever global experiment with intrinsically worthless money started in 1971 when President Nixon detached gold from the dollar. That experiment is rapidly drawing towards a drastic ending. To achieve its global ambitions, the United States, as a democracy, could only fund its military industrial complex by seizing the world’s reserve currency. That has worked for decades by allowing the U.S. to print trillions of dollars to finance regime changes, endless wars and buy cheap consumer goods. Over the following decades, most all international trade was transacted in dollars allowing Americans to live lavishly beyond their means. Economist Robert Triffin understood that this was an unstable system because when one country owns the world’s reserve currency it breeds economic imbalances, domestically and globally, until the system collapses. That day appears now to be arriving. Domestically America’s middle class lost high paying value-added industrial jobs to ensure that massive trade deficits occurred. They voted for Trump. Internationally, the financial crisis of 2008 convinced many nations not aligned with NATO to begin planning an exit from an increasingly unstable dollar-based fiat monetary regime and to create a more stable commodity-based trading system of their own. Now, almost every day another nonaligned nation announces it no longer needs or wants to own dollars as they seek to join the competing system engineered by the BRICS nations. That system is backed by commodity wealth and monetized by gold. With gold restored to its rightful place as money, nations in this new system can confidently shun an increasingly unstable dollar described by Triffin in favor of a system backed by tangible wealth in the form of commodities and gold monetization. Unlike the dollar, which is backed only by a promise to pay, currency in this new system is backed by actual tangible wealth and convertible into gold money for balance of payment settlement purposes. Alasdair will explain why the dollar system is increasingly unstable and how the laws of physics and nature are leading the world, starting with Asia, back to a newly revised gold standard. Michael will introduce the Alpha Exploration story with its world class gold, copper, and base metal projects in Eritrea. | 
