How to start an essay on my year… Well, I traveled a lot. First, I went to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and then Dubai. I had to come home for our annual face-to-face meeting in Arizona. We gather all the employees for a week of presentations, meetings, and informal gatherings. We call this “The Refinery”, because it’s pure gold. By the way, I recommend every company take the time and spend the money to gather the whole team, offsite. It is so worth it.
Before I go on, I have to offer my observation about travel and the reaction of most people. They think it’s glamorous. I really enjoy meeting customers in person. And I have friends in many cities around the world. It’s great to catch up, have a few beers… and learn that a certain word of profanity, used in America only as a gutter word for a certain part of one gender’s anatomy, is used as an ironic term of endearment in New Zealand. It was … interesting … to see a bunch of guys all slinging this word at each other. Who knew?
Anyways, it seems glamorous looking in from the outside. But like pop stars, who look so good dancing and singing on stage, elite athletes who can move in ways the rest of us cannot even imagine, it’s mostly hard work. For them, literally blood, sweat, and tears. For the business traveler, it’s many hours sitting (or trying to sleep) in an airline seat. Eating greasy starch in an airport lounge, because you don’t know when you will eat next (delays are a real risk). Jetlag and being dead tired in important meetings. And at the end of a long day, getting on video calls at midnight (Dubai is 11 hours ahead of Arizona).
At the risk of making it look glamorous, I will say that Marriott awarded me “Ambassador Elite” status. I get automatic room upgrades of several levels, usually to a suite. Automatic access to the business lounge. And they serve free wine and scotch from 6-8pm every day. Johnny Walker Red Label is OK, and the cabernet is drinkable.
But it’s basically the Booby Prize. You spend a year living out of a suitcase, and the hotels take care of you a bit more than they would otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take it! I’ll take it, but nobody would do this for the sake of the lifestyle.
After the Refinery, I spent almost the entire rest of the year on the road. I got home in mid December. Much of that time was spent in London (fantastic in the summer) and Dubai (117F or 47C plus 75% humidity in the summer).
My wife came to the UK to join me. We went on a cruise up to Norway and saw the fjords. Very cool! In a Viking living museum village, we heard about the causes of “armed Scandinavian tourism” to England and France.
I spoke at a gold conference in India. Bangalore is a lot cooler in the summer than I expected. The hotel was very nice. And the chaos and poverty between the airport and the hotel is worse than you would expect.
In the fall, weather conditions flip. Dubai weather becomes really nice.
In Dubai, there’s no pork, especially bacon (and no medium rare burgers to put it on). I began to crave both. And honey glazed ham. In Dubai, you get gallons of hot water raining down on you in the shower, to help you wake up in the morning. It’s very first world.
Dubai fascinates me. There is that crazy thin spire, drawing me like a moth to a flame.
There is no income tax, which benefits people from every country except the US (which taxes Americans on income earned abroad). Dubai is a pro-business environment, whereas in America, the regulators more and more look for ways to expand their power, which is to say, to block business activity and to add cost. To make everything frictional.
One visible difference is the architecture. Call some of those Dubai skyscrapers what you will…
There is a greater range of aesthetics. Some of them seem rather pointless but many look very cool. I don’t know how zoning and building permits work there, but clearly they don’t have endless Community Meetings to invite all the enviers to argue why the property owner shouldn’t be allowed to build what he wants, which enforce conformity in most US architecture.
Hotels have air conditioning in outdoor courtyards. Did I mention it gets to 47C and 75%? There is a sense, in which this is a crazy extravaganza. But also a sense in which, if you can afford it, why not? Without green energy restrictions and taxes, energy is cheap (and should be cheap, it’s part of what makes the modern world so much better than the ancient world).
It is a first-world place, at least for people who expect to pay for what they get. I will share an example. I tripped and fell, walking into a revolving door. In my haste to push myself out of the way of the still-moving door, I cut my left pinky and jammed it pretty good too. I went to the emergency room. The first thing is to show your passport and demonstrate means of payment. No money, no treatment.
But after that, it was extremely efficient and I did not wait to see the admitting nurse, then the doctor, then the X-Ray, then they cleaned and bandaged my finger, then the doctor to explain it was not broken and give me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and antibiotics. Total cost, including the two medications: $250. My care was first class.
No “free” healthcare, but for an uninsured patient at least 10X cheaper than in America.
In Dubai, there are prominent signs talking about ideas that, once they are out in the public discourse, cannot be unsaid. Ideas such as all people must be equal under the law. Compare to the rhetoric of both the Left and the Right in the US or Europe right now. Ideas motivate cultures, nations, and ultimately drive history.
One last thing to say about Dubai, they do not seem to restrict the number of people who come to work. There is no minimum wage. There is no welfare system for non-Emiratis. The net result is that wages for unskilled labor are very low, but wages for skilled work and professionals are much higher. There is also no income tax, so salaries go much farther than in America—and people can save for retirement.
I went back to London before heading home. London gets dark and dreary even when the sun is in a blue sky. No warmth and not a lot of light.
Finally, I got home. Phoenix weather is not that different from Dubai this time of year.
I took the family to a Christmas brunch at a local hotel. They had honey glazed ham, the best!
I was reminded that we have regulations which make it so we can’t have nice things. The shower goes “pttthhhh”, with a bunch of little needle jets which hardly wash off the soap. America was never the place where the quality of life was lower. Now, in some ways, it is.
There is a reason for all this travel. To grow Monetary Metals!
And, by every metric, we had rapid growth this year. We raised over 1M ounces of silver to finance a mine restart for Bunker Hill. The number and size of our gold lessees increased substantially, and of course this would not be possible without adding gold deposits and depositors. We established Monetary Metals DMCC, a subsidiary in Dubai. We grew our headcount to 43 people.
To finance this growth, we raised over $5M in equity capital, and sold a 4,700 ounce gold bond which pays 6%. This is the first gold bond that isn’t for a mining company.
I’ve been saying for years that an informal, working definition of a gold standard is when anyone who wants to, can earn interest on their gold in gold. Therefore, the gold standard is when we scale up. Well, we are in the scaling phase.
Incidentally, this highlights something missing in the crypto world. Will someone create a Monetary Cyptos, to pay bitcoin interest on bitcoin (and doge interest on doge) by lending it out to productive businesses? You can’t have a monetary system without finance (and finance is required for large-scale productive enterprises).
I am throwing down the gauntlet.
Speaking of monetary systems, I was asked to write the monetary chapter for a forthcoming book published by Springer. Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Theory and Political Reality. Coming in February.
It’s been a helluva year!
Keith Weiner Economics 