Forbes
@forbes·2.1M subscribers·11.3K videos
Gold: Understanding The Only Tangible Financial Asset | Forbes
Posted
April 17, 2022
Views
32,211
Likes
909
Comments
97
Engagement
3.12%
April 17, 2022
32,211
909
97
3.12%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
3:10Now PlayingCyberattacks. Inflation. Pandemic. Is your money safe?
The question is asked by Simon Mikhailovich, a Russian émigré and entrepreneur who is in the business of selling a certain kind of safety. His New York City–based Bullion Reserve has wealthy families as clients. On their behalf his firm buys gold bricks from refineries, has them picked up by Loomis armored trucks and delivers them to guarded warehouses located on two continents.
For this worrywart it won’t do to buy shares of a precious-metals fund and then leave those shares in the custody of a bank. That bank is part of a fragile web in which wealth is represented by electronic blips. A lot of things could destroy the web: hackers, a loss of faith in government as a protector of wealth, a liquidity crisis, an electromagnetic pulse.
Mikhailovich, 63, has been preoccupied with risk for most of his career, first with an insurance company, then with a hedge fund that speculated on debt derivatives and got stung by the Lehman failure, and now with his bullion operation.
Aren’t most financial assets backstopped? Don’t we have a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for bank accounts and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation for brokerage accounts? Mikhailovich scoffs. Their reserves are adequate to cover one institution, if that institution is small enough to fail. They would be overwhelmed by a system-wide failure.
Read the full story on Forbes
Subscribe to FORBES
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters
Forbes on Facebook
Forbes Video on Twitter
Forbes Video on Instagram
More From Forbes
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
