Jim Hunter: Why Christians should buy Gold! (And how Trump can help!) DMW#250

Is investing in gold important for Christians? Let's find out. Stick around. Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between, broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Moore. You can find out more about us at dmwpodcast .com, or check us out on the socials, Dead Men Walking Podcast, TwitterX, at realdmwpodcast.

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Let's support other brothers in the Lord that are building things, running businesses and bringing glory to God in it. All right. This week we had on James or Jim Hunter as he goes by Alps Precious Metals Group and we talked all gold and it was awesome.

I've been waiting for someone like this to come on the podcast for almost four years, five years now. A guy who understands investing in gold, understands monetary policy. We talked about the Federal Reserve.

We talked about how gold can help against inflation, how it's a good investment strategy. We talked about policy. Towards the end of the episode, we got into what we should be looking forward to into a Trump administration, how that's going to affect pricing and inflation and gold and all that stuff.

I mean, it was really a policy heavy episode, not so much a theology or doctrine that I've gotten to in the past with people when talking about this stuff, but as a guy who was on Wall Street, who's in the finance industry, who has 40 plus years experience in that very successful hedge fund manager.

I mean, this is the guy you want to talk to. And now he's going, look at what I'm doing is I'm trying to help Christians to invest wisely and understand the power of gold. Talking about Genesis 2, when the river runs out of Eden and the gold is good.

God called gold good from the creation story. So very interesting. We talked about all of those things and I found the episode very informative. And I think we have to clean up some audio in some of it.

Our connection on some of it went a little bit sideways, but I'll make sure we clean it up as best as we can. Give it a listen, guys. I mean, if you are looking around you today, in this world and going, banking sucks, crony capitalism sucks, our monetary policy sucks, inflation is through the roof.

What's going on? Jim broke it down for us, told us exactly what was going on, how we resolve that, how we invest our money wisely. And even if you're a church elder or a shepherd and you have monetary funds in your church, some of that should be gold, silver, or precious metals.

And he makes quite a good case for that. So guys, the next two voices you hear will be me and Jim Hunter from Alps Precious Metal Group, talking gold. It's the gold episode. Stick around. Also, Jim Hunter, welcome to Dead Man Walking Man.

Good to see you.

Jim Hunter’s Background in Reformed Churches and Wall Street

Again. Honored to be here. Great to meet you, Fight, Laugh, Feast. And always fun to be with those boys from Moscow, Idaho, and meet new friends and brethren that are all across the country. So.

Great to be here and thank you for having me. Yeah. So I'd seen you on CrossPolitik before. We met for the first time a few weeks ago at Fight, Laugh, Feast. And I wanted to have you and talk about something that's always been very interesting to me is because I've had some guys on from Thank God for Bitcoin.

They do a little investing in Bitcoin and stuff. And you've got that. And I've always been kind of very squirmish on fiat money and non-gold backed money, especially since we came off that standard in the mid seventies.

And, you know, I was a real fun high schooler, you know, because for our senior projects, they were doing Van Halen and my favorite band. And I'm going, well, I want to do the buying of Congress and why we're off the gold standard.

Right. You know, it's like so from from a younger age, I was always very interested in monetary policy and in what we're kind of doing. And, you know, my father, he invests in gold and silver and some other things.

And I want to talk to you about that. But before we get in that, can you give us a little bio on yourself, a little origin story of Jim Hunter, where you're from,.

What you're about and what you're doing now? Sure. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I was amongst a lot of reform brethren of the rare. You know, it's like those bumper stickers you see that say native.

I was I was reformed before reform was cool. Right. OK, so. But that was mainline church. Had a call of ministry when I was seven years old, majoring religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, which is no conservative bulwark by any stretch of the imagination.

But we did have to read the scriptures and we did have to read Augustine. We did have to read Calvin and Luther. And I and I'm going to school in the mid 80s. And I was just stunned by what Christianity was, what I thought Jesus was and then who he actually is in the scriptures with these great saints that had gone before us.

That led into a long and winding road of Episcopalian continuing churches, which morphed ultimately into the Anglican Church. I have never felt those guys were they were they were getting at the margin, getting at the edges, but they weren't getting to the disease.

And the disease is that the complete trust of scripture. How do you know that? Because you still have women ministers all over the Anglican, whatever it was called, ACNA, Anglican Church of North America.

So that led me to the CREC because of the the original constitution of the CREC, which is Sola Scriptura, Apostle Nicene, Athanasian Creed, and then one of the four confessions, one of which was in 39 articles.

I said I was raised Presbyterian, which I was, but both sets of grandparents were Episcopalian. And I spent a lot of time in Episcopal youth group, et cetera. And in my Presbyterian upbringing, if there's such a thing as high Presbyterian, that's what I was.

That's how I was raised. So the differential was almost zero. I still believe that there is a huge. There's an amount of the Lord's flock that is basically wandering around that if you restored a J .C. Ryle, truly reformed, truly dedicated to the scriptures, 30 articles, the creeds church, that that church would would and will thrive.

And that prayer. So that's on the how God has kindly given me faith, grown me in the faith, et cetera. In terms of my day job, that is I was always my grand. You had mentioned your dad and my grandfather was a physician in Boston and he was in his focus was hematology, diseases of the blood, leukemia.

But no one could understand him if he ever started to talk shop as it was way over what he said. But he didn't let him talk about Wall Street. So I was I was when I went to declare my major, it wasn't religion, was it economics, religion, economics, eventually religion.

But it was fascinated with Wall Street markets that led me to. Ultimately, I got an MBA at Auburn University where the Ludwig von Mises free Austrian Economics Institute is heavily influenced by those guys.

They are a hard money group as well. So I went down that path and that led me eventually to First Tennessee Bank and their fixed income division, which then led to Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. And I was all involved with that part of Wall Street on the institutional fixed income side of sales and trade.

I then had, if you're familiar with the film, The Big Short. Sure. And and another one, if you're if you haven't seen this or your viewers haven't seen the film, A Margin Call, Margin Call nails it. I have been in those rooms.

They absolutely got it right. But I bring those up only because from 05 to 2010, my partner and I, my partner at the time had a structured credit hedge fund. We essentially were the big short. We were Michael Burry.

We did not take as much risk as he did because we were two guys in Fair Hope, Alabama, with a couple of Bloomberg screens and we couldn't get this wrong like he did. But we did very, very well. But the denouement of that was watching firms like Merrill Lynch, like JP Morgan, like Goldman Sachs.

All of them literally should be out of business. They should. If it was not a rules for the and not for me situation, which is right now, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, JP Morgan, Bank of America all would have had the fate of the Duke brothers at the end of trading places where they say margin callboys and they say, you know perfectly well, we don't have $394 million in cash.

So that's what should have happened to it, but it didn't. And when I watched how that occurred and what we did as a hedge fund and how we differentiate, how we competed against guys in London and New York and San Francisco, is we said, if you come in and need liquidity, we will give it to you, which we did.

And our assets went from essentially with the gains that then went from something like 50 million all the way down to two, because we did what we said we were going to do. But meanwhile, we have these counterparties that are offsides, don't have capital and they're recapitalized from the Federal Reserve and the United States government.

And we're now 15 years past the fact that these guys are still flying around on G7s like, oh yeah, we weathered the storm. No, you didn't. You didn't weather the storm at all. This is a joke. So that's sort of a bad taste in my mouth and wanting to get, and I had always said, I mentioned my grandfather, because in addition to talking about Wall Street, he also talked about gold.

Not a lot, but enough to where when he combined my grandfather, my time at Auburn and the Von Mises Institute and hard money, and then seeing what happened to Wall Street, that's what led me there. And now I live in Pensacola, Florida, partially related to the fact that my children went to Trinitas Christian School, which is an AC, it's one of the flagship ACS class schools, was part of Providence Church as well, where Uri Brito is.

So I've got a history here. And through the school, I met my current partner, who's also a gold guy. And we started this company about eight years ago. And the focus of our company is to say, what's our value add?

It's to come to individuals, corporations, and Greg, I would especially say churches. So any elders listening to this podcast, I would beg them, whether they buy an ounce of gold or silver from me or not, I don't care who they buy it from.

But churches have got to start thinking about their exposure to a financial system that is not their friend. And if we get into a 2008 2 .0, and I would argue there is every reason, I don't care how high the markets are, you still, this is a castle, this is a castle that's been built on sand.

If it was this simple, and all we have to do is just take interest rates to zero, recapitalize through a bank. Why don't we just do it all the time, just zero and everybody's going to be a zillionaire, three car garage.

What's the problem? Right? But there is a problem. And that's what this is all built on. So how do you mitigate those risks? How can one be as wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove? I've said to many people at the fight lab feast that would come to our booth and say, look, I am not telling you to light your hair on fire, sell every single asset you have and run to the hills and get in the cave with your gold stashed like a dragon.

What I am saying is, realize that when this goes again, they're going to come for the deposits. And where am I getting that from? That straight out of the Dodd-Frank Act now is now in law. And if you go to Title Two of that, it tells you in black and white, how will the S-CIFIs, systemically important financial institutions, how are they going to be recapitalized?

They're going to be recapitalized by changing the capital structure, a waterfall of where the money comes from to recapitalize, say JP Morgan. Sure, it'll come from the equity holders, but what they've done is moved to the senior status, the off-balance sheet derivative swap contracts of the S-CIFIs.

Which means who goes first when they're looking for capital? It's going to be the depositors. And here I am, and this is why I talk about churches. Let's say a church, God has blessed them for 10 years and they want to build a building.

So they have very faithfully been putting up side their ties and their offerings. And that thing's built up to five or $10 million. And here, I guarantee you, if I go to the session meeting, they're all going to be we have to be very conservative with these assets.

So we're going to put them in CDs in banks, right? Because they are FDIC insured. Which for the listeners really means.

Nothing due to fractional banking, but if there was really a run on banks, but go ahead.

Because the capital, you're talking about a capital base, the FDIC of 25 billion with a B and you're talking about an asset size of JP Morgan in the multiple trillions. There is no insurance. And I use the example of a church building fund because anything over that 250 ,000 insured amount is going to be liable to be bailed in.

And if you use the example of Cyprus, if you look at the Cypriot bank crisis of 2013, the deposit in those financial institutions were bailed in and they got a 50 haircut. So here I am, I'm an elder, I've been doing the right thing.

I've been prudent. The banks, 2008 2 .0, here comes the haircut. We thought we were going to build our building next fall. Oh, no, we're not because that just got cut in half. So if I'm prudent, maybe I don't have to take it all out.

But what if I say put 10 or 20 in the physical vote? If I do that, then what happens if we get into 2008 2 .0? Is gold going to go down? Or is it going to rally? I'm going to argue that it's going to rally against that sort of confiscation.

A lot of people will say, Jim, but didn't FDR confiscate gold in 1933? And the answer is yes, he did. No doubt about it. The difference between 1933 and 90 years later is that in 1933, the confiscation of gold was a material take.

It mattered when they basically stole the gold from American individuals. It was a material amount of capital. And it was able to offset what on a relative basis was no debt problem at all. Now you're looking at $35 trillion.

Now on the grand scale of things, hardly anybody has gold. If the US government tried to confiscate American holdings of physical gold, it wouldn't move the needle at all. As opposed to we're going to bail in their treasuries, their IRAs, their bank exposure.

Now that's a material amount of money.

Gold as Protection Against Inflation and Bank Bail-Ins

So gold helps against this how? Meaning we know, like you just explained, we know if there's a run on the banks or there has to be a bailout, they're coming for the depositors first. And when you say that, just so I want to make sure everyone's understanding what we're talking about too, a depositor, meaning any money that you have in any bank could be used under Dodd-Frank.

That was one of the things that passed. And I remember screaming about this going, okay, so now me and you are on the hook for the next bailout. I would say we have something coming in the future just for me being in real estate and understanding what's going on there and in the commercial bubble that's next with lease rates and things like that.

So we come to someone like you who, what's your official title? Is it contractor? Are you a facilitator, broker? What is it that?

The company name is Alps Precious Metals Group. Alps comes from the fact that when we first started the company, our primary partner was in the little country of Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein Precious Metals.

We love them because it was two family offices that had their own, these were ultra high net worth families, use their own capital, built their own trading facility, built their own class 10 Lloyd's of London, top of the food chain vault in Liechtenstein.

As over the eight years that we've been in business, we now have a domestic partner as well, Texas Precious Metals in the little town of Shiner, Texas. For those of you who've heard of Shiner bought beer, the vault is right across the street from the brewery.

But same situation, ultra high net worth family, built their own trading desk, built everything from scratch, built their own vault. And that's the key to it is, sure, there's Brinks, there's Loomis, there are alternatives out there, and there's certainly bank vaults.

But the trouble with the bank vault is, wait a second, I'm trying to hedge bank risk, and I just stuck my hedge in the very thing I'm trying to hedge. So that doesn't make a lot of sense. So yeah, so what I was just going to answer, so to answer, what are we, so we are really in a if you really pulled all the pulled the onion back, you'd say, Okay, what you guys, what you're really doing is you're consulting with individuals, families, churches and corporations to say, the first thing we're doing is the concept, it's the teaching of the concept and why it matters.

And then we have partnerships. And this is, you know, how do you guys get paid, we get paid, because when we bring clientele to either Texas or Liechtenstein, well, these are clients that our partner firms wouldn't have had without us.

So they simply we have a revenue share with them on any revenue stream, that there's no added commission, no, not none of that nonsense. It's just simple. Those are the prices for vaulting or for trading that you would have paid that you never heard of Alps.

But but all Alps is doing is sharing the revenue that our partners would have had. So hopefully, that makes it clear. And when it comes down to the nut cutting of okay, we're going to buy the gold and put it in the vault.

Well, then then we become as if we are Texas precious metals, right? It's on their team in.

That sense. So if someone comes to you and goes, Yeah, I want to diversify or Yeah, I want to invest in gold is it's a it's physical gold. We're not talking about something on the stock market or something like that.

And are they are they are you putting it in their hands? Or is it like you said, in a vault somewhere and they have access to it? Or how does that work?

They're their choice. So if Greg says, Okay, I'm sold on the concept. Let's go. I'd say, Okay, Greg, there's going to be a waterfall of questions. Number one, are we buying this? Because you think that we may not get to Mad Max, but we might get close.

And I want to be sure I've got I've got something in my hands that I can use to go down to the grocery store, if necessary. Or you might say, No, I don't think that at all. And this is just for investment purposes.

That's going to drive whether we're going to buy coins or whether we're going to buy the biggest bars we can. Your real estate guy, you know, anybody knows that the more of something you buy, the cheaper is you're going to the execution price is going to be same thing.

No difference. And then the next question is, do you want to keep it in the vault? Or do you want to keep it in your own vault, you might have a gun safe at home, you might have a first class safe that's in on your property.

So you don't need to vault it necessarily. The only downside with keeping it at home is the liquidity side. Let's say for whatever reason, you know, world, Wall Street goes up in a sheet of flame. The stocks crash 90%.

Gold goes to the moon. Oh, wait, now's the time to sell the gold and buy the stocks. Well, now we got to if you've got it at home. It's not. It's just not a quick turnaround. You've got to get it back.

And of course, you have no insurance at home. If you go to your state farm guy and say, Hey, I'd like to insure $100 ,000 worth of gold that I got back in my safe at home. First, he's going to pass out.

Then you get the smelling salts, wake him up and he's gonna say that'll cost you 15 grand a year to do that. Keep it in the vault with us. Your vault charge includes the Lloyd's of London insurance against embezzlement, theft, any of the typical loss events.

Money as a Store of Labor and Gold as Real Money

So let me ask you this, because I've been thinking a lot about this. We've kind of been as Western American Christians indoctrinated into this kind of money system and how we use money, put it in a bank, put it in a savings account, maybe a CD like you were saying.

And then when you go to the Bible, it's very different. It's money being working for you. And it seems I could even point to a few parables that seem very capitalistic. People get upset when I say that, but I see that kind of free market system played out in the Bible is probably under us, sin nature, probably one of the fairest systems and most just systems that you can have.

But I hear all these Christians complaining about the banking system is crooked and fractional banking is evil and all this, but they don't really want to take the next step and go, okay, well, let's buck the system a little bit.

And it still seems like gold sometimes has a little bit of a stigma to it, or sometimes they just go, I don't know if I want to take that step. They'll complain all day about the system and even live through the last two years and see that overnight, you can have rapid inflation due to the monetary policy of the federal reserve in the US federal government, but then not necessarily want to take that next step and go, I don't know if I want to get into precious metal, gold, silver, things like that.

Even though probably one of the gold, one of the oldest precious metals that have been used for monetary policy going back well before Christ has been used by civilizations for centuries and centuries.

What would you tell to that Christian listening right now that goes, listen, I do recognize that there's issues with monetary policy globally and in the United States, I do realize it's a crooked system and a sinful system.

What should I do to take that next step to get into.

Precious metal, into gold and silver? Okay, so first of all, I'm going to start with Genesis chapter 2 verses 11 and 12. Pre-fall, God tells us about the rivers that go forth for me. And the first one is Passau, and it goes into the land of Pabla, and there is gold in that land, and the gold of that land is good.

Why is the Lord telling us that in Genesis chapter 2 before the fall? So this is before we've even blown the whole thing up and dispersed into the East of Eden, right? I think there's a reason for that because gold throughout the rest of the scriptures is a measuring, it's the marker.

Wisdom is better than pure gold. It's higher, lower, whatever, but God is using it as a measuring tool for us. And then it is not a coink-a-dink that you've got gold, as you just mentioned, used all over the world.

To this day, as far as human history as we have it, and 6 ,000, I'm a young earth guy, 6 ,000 years of history, period, well, there's never a period where you can point to, well, gold really wouldn't have worked then.

No, that's not true. It always works. It works to this day. To this day, it is the thing. It's one of the number one materials we use in.

Semiconductors in our electronics. It's crazy how it just spans eons and centuries and it's.

Still useful. Yep, absolutely. And then you say, well, if I look at the governments of the world today with our Bitcoin and our this and our that, we put men on the moon and we've got more computing power in that phone than a wall of IBM computers 50 years ago, da-da-da-da.

And yet, what is the largest non-real estate physical holding of governments all around the world? Every last one of them is their physical gold position. So, if I say that, and one of the things I say to prospective investors, or certainly a Christian, is like, look, forget every other argument we've brought up.

Why don't you just want to get on the same side of the trade as these guys? Hey, what do I know? All I know is the United States got 8 ,133 tons of golds with a market value today of something like 750 billion.

Think of it this way. Is it their asset of last resort? What if we just let, instead of using the financial markets and the futures markets to monkey around and cap the price, what if we let the thing run?

Move the decimal one to the right. All of a sudden, I've got a $7 trillion asset versus my debt problem. And if I'm these guys like Musk and the Beck and the rest of those dudes who are probably, if they're allowed to do so, if they're allowed to actually get after it, they really could chop the debt problem down, certainly to get us back to, at least we'd start paying the debt down.

And they might say, let's let gold fly. And let's let it figure out where it's supposed to.

Actually settle. So, expand on that a little bit for me, because maybe I'm not understanding. So, you're saying let gold fly and let it settle. Is it being regulated in some way or explain what.

You mean by what they're doing? I think if you look at the, in general, if we looked at the London banking system and if we look at Wall Street, those guys are not long gold. So, let's step back. Why are they not long gold?

Well, because gold ultimately, going back to what we were talking about gold and land of Babylon, Genesis chapter two. One of the things that also try to talk about is get the definition of money down before we do anything else.

What is the definition of money? Well, money is a unit of account. It's a medium of exchange. But the most important thing is, it's a store of labor. And what happens with gold, when you do your Deadman Walking podcast, you sell real estate, you go and do something.

And let me bring in a quote from JP Morgan. That guy was no Christian, etc. A lot of bad things about the guy. But he said, gold is money, and everything else is credit. Gold is money, everything else is credit.

And he's 100 right. Wall Street in London, know that gold is actual money. It's a place where you can put your labor, and you don't, there is no way to mess around with that labor. What happens there to you, to me, and to all of our, every human being, every time a government does something, where they create credit out of thin air, they have debauched the labor of every single person.

That works. Thank you. Yes, I've been saying this for years. I wish people would understand really that money is just a bucket and a way to carry your labor, which is your time, which is the most precious asset that we have.

And inflation and bad monetary policy literally is robbing you of your labor and your time. They go, oh, you had to go spend eight hours to earn that? Well, guess what? It's actually like you spent 12 hours, or it's like I took six hours from you.

It's insane that we don't equate money with our time when most people work those nine to fives, 40 hours a week, don't see their kids, don't see their wife. And then through bad monetary policy, through inflation, through all these things at the Federal Reserve, they just literally steal that back from you.

It's theft is what it is. And when in fact, you made a good point of going, look at when inflation rises, the price of gold actually protects against that, which I've always found interesting. So it's twofold.

Not only are you not taking from me, but I have an asset that actually goes up faster than the rate of inflation, because it is the asset or commodity or however you want to say it in financial terms that people want in times of trouble.

So much so we had to send fake gold over to China in the 90s. We spray painted it. We didn't have enough for them. And I don't know if you know that story. I don't know, maybe a little.

Conspiracy theory. There's lots of gold painted stories out there. So gold is good. We have a.

Whole generation that doesn't even know or understand that we were on a gold standard, that you used to get a silver note, that if you turned it into a federal bank, you could exchange it for silver. Like there's these weird things that not that long ago was pretty standard in our society.

And now you have, you know, even millennials and alphas and Gen Zs and younger going, what are you talking about? All they know is that money seems cheap. Inflation is horrible. Like, what are we doing?

Which leads me to why did we get off the gold standard, do you think, in the United States? And should we get back on it? Or should we pursue that at all? Do you think from a political standpoint or just go, you know what, we're going to do our own things as Christians, believers, being wise with our money, we'll invest in gold,.

And just let everything else sort itself out? Well, we got very simple about the why did we get off the gold standard? And not only silver certificates, but what is in your wallet, today in your wallet, you pull the dollar out and it says, this note is legal tender for all.

What? Debts, public and private. Well, if I have something in my hand, basic accounting, if I have something in my hand, that is legal tender for a debt, what by definition must it be?

A credit. Yeah.

J .P. Morgan. Gold is money. Everything else is credit. I'm walking around with credit, not with not with money. Okay. So what was gold doing in the late 60s, early 70s? It was keeping Congress honest.

If you oh, you want to go fight a war in Vietnam and run up all kinds of inflation because of what you're doing, fine. According to the Bretton Woods Agreement, then I can come change my dollars and you got to fork the gold over.

In fact, Charles de Gaulle, who knew exactly what kind of a cesspool we had just gotten ourselves involved in in Vietnam, because the French had left, was watching what we're doing on. Oh, no, I don't want these dollars.

And he literally sent a destroyer, a French destroyer sitting in the Chesapeake Bay saying, load that bad boy up. I want the gold. Here's your dollars. I don't want them.

Yeah.

Nixon and John Connolly go, oh, if people get it, if the government and folks around the world get any bright ideas, we're not going to have any gold left. Yeah. So what does he do? Nixon gets on television, August 15, 71.

Secretary Connolly after deliberations have temporarily suspended the ability to change dollars in for gold. Well, because they didn't want to fill up the French destroyer with our gold. Now, is that reprehensible behavior?

You say that we'll do something and then we just, no, we're not going to do it. Well, that's what we did. We've done the same thing in Ukraine. James Baker to Gorbachev, we will not move NATO one inch to the east.

That is a flat lie. And that's all we've done is shoved it further and further east. And then we wonder why we're having a terrible problem over there.

Right.

But so we closed it because in closing the gold window, that allowed the government to do whatever they wanted in terms of. Spend without any responsibility. Yeah, correct. Spend for Vietnam, spend for social programs, whatever you have.