Our Favorite Veteran of Real Wars and the Gold Wars…
Our friend Maurice Jackson at Proven & Probable has just done an interview with another friend of ours: Bob Moriarty, the founder of 321gold.com, one of the best and most popular gold sites on the web. Many of our readers probably know Bob, or at least know about him. We want to nevertheless provide a few introductory words below, to elaborate a bit on what Bob does for those who don’t know about him, and also to let readers know how we met him, why we like him and why we have the utmost respect for him.
We first met Bob on the old Kitco Forum, a low-tech, completely uncensored message board for gold aficionadoes that was truly great fun while it lasted. What initially drew our attention was his principled, eloquent and quite vociferous anti-war stance. We and a few others soon joined him in lambasting G.W. Bush and his gaggle of lying neo-con chicken-hawk warmongers at every opportunity. Just as Ludwig von Mises did, we and Bob strongly believe that peace is the “father of all things”, not war.
We mention this inter alia because we have noticed that people that have actually seen action as members of the military frequently turn into the most ardent opponents of war. Bob is a veteran of the Vietnam war; he was an F-4B fighter pilot for the Marines. In fact, when he joined at age 20 he was the youngest naval aviator in the Vietnam war. He achieved the rank of captain at the tender age of 22 and ultimately performed 824 missions. Bob knows war personally and has nothing but contempt for it. He has just published a new book on the topic, entitled “The Art of Peace” (details on where one can get hold of his books are provided at the end of the video below).
Incidentally, Bob is an ace pilot. In 1984 he performed one of his most famous stunts as a pilot, when he flew a Beechcraft Bonanza plane between the pillars of the Eiffel Tower in Paris for the sheer heck of it (scroll to A plane between the tower’s pillars on the Eiffel Tower’s “major events” page, or even better, read Bob’s own account of the event, A Bonanza in Paris).
Bob has been active in the financial markets as an investor for a very long time. The mining and oil & gas sectors are his specialty, but his knowledge goes well beyond that. We are always interested in what Bob has to say, whether he talks about geopolitics, the financial landscape, or specific investment ideas, and his editorials and analyses at 321gold are among our must-reads. Over the years, Bob has inter alia provided his readers with countless excellent ideas in the junior mining/ exploration sub-sector. Often he is quite literally “going the extra mile”, as he frequently travels to the sites of exploration and development projects to inspect them in person.
Below is a video of the wide-ranging interview Bob has just given to Maurice. Maurice has provided us with a brief summary of the topics that were discussed:
“Bob addresses his concerns over the differences between candidate Trump and President Trump, which have emerged with the recent bombings of Syria and Afghanistan, as well as the potential threat of war with North Korea and or Russia. He then moves on to the big elephant in the room, in the form the U.S. government debt and the treasury bond market and the government’s resolve, or rather the lack thereof, to find a solution to the ever more pressing debt problem. Bob also shares his opinion on the importance of capital preservation in today’s environment and lets us in on which precious metals he is buying at the moment and why. Listeners will also hear about a number of junior mining companies that represent unique value propositions for speculators and investors.