Overstock Holds
3 Months Of Food, $10 Million In Gold For Employees In Preparation
For The Next Collapse by Tyler Durden |
October 26, 2015
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s
crusade against naked short sellers in particular, and Wall
Street and the Federal Reserve in general, has long been
known and thoroughly documented (most recently with his
push to use blockchain technology to revolutionize the multi-trillion
repo market).
But little did we know that Overstock’s
Chairman Jonathan Johnson is as vocal an opponent of the
fiat system, and Wall Street’s tendency to create bubble
after bubble, if not more than Byrne himself. That, and
that his company actually puts its money where its gold-backed
money is and in preparation for the next upcoming crash,
has taken unprecedented steps to prepare for what comes
next.
One week ago Johnson, who is also candidate
for Utah governor, spoke at the United Precious Metals Association,
or UPMA, which we first profiled a month ago, and which
takes advantage of Utah’s special status allowing the it
to use gold as legal tender, offering gold and silver-backed
accounts. As a reminder, the UPMA takes Federal Reserve
Notes (or paper dollars) which it then translates into golden
dollars (or silver). The golden dollars are based off the
$50 one ounce gold coins produced by the Treasury of The
United States. They are legal tender under the law and are
protected as such.
What did Johnson tell the UPMA? Here are
some choice quotes:
We are not big fans of
Wall Street and we don’t trust them. We foresaw the financial
crisis, we fought against the financial crisis that happened
in 2008; we don’t trust the banks still and we foresee that
with QE3, and QE4 and QE n that at some point there is going
to be another significant financial crisis.
So what do we do as a business so that we would be prepared
when that happens. One thing that we do that is fairly
unique: we have about $10 million in gold, mostly the
small button-sized coins, that we keep outside of the
banking system. We expect that when there is a financial
crisis there will be a banking holiday. I don’t know if
it will be 2 days, or 2 weeks, or 2 months. We have $10
million in gold and silver in denominations small enough
that we can use for payroll. We want to be able to keep
our employees paid, safe and our site up and running during
a financial crisis.
We also happen to have three
months of food supply for every employee that we can live
on.
The contents of the rest
of his speech are largely familiar to advocates of sound money:
fiat paper has no value, solid gold – as both a currency and
an asset – has tremendous value but is difficult to transport
(and since a systemic collapse would certainly involve gold
confiscation, portability would be an issue); gold-backed
money may be the best option, and so on.
We are confident the echo-chamber of worthless econohacks
and macrotourists, the same ones who were absolutely certain
the great financial crisis will never happen, will be quick
to mock “prepper” Johnson and Wall Street pariah Overstock.
And they have every right to do so. We only hope that after
the next crash, with central banks all in and when calls
for another global bailout hit a fever pitch, that all those
pundits who made fun of the Johnsons of the world, will
keep their damn mouth shut.