Roger Lipton, based in New York City, operates a hedge fund partnership valued at $40 million, for his own account and for friends and family.
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> Roger is a regular visitor to Park City for the skiing experience and is a good friend and close associate of LSDM stalwart, Pancake.
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> Roger is a devotee of Austrian school of economics, of which the best known proponents are Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard.
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> Lipton has had republished the works of Harry Browne, an Austrian economics devotee, and 70's author, who predicted many of the adverse financial circumstances (large deficits, growing borrowing, financial crises, and strained economic growth) that we see today.
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> Roger, as an investor, is an advocate of a gold standard to back the currency.  From his news letter (which is a good summary of Roger's remarks to LSDM):
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> As students of economic history, we believe the record clearly shows god in a disciplinary role during the most productive periods of long term non-inflationary growth.  The antithesis of this is the economic malaise and inflationary tendencies over those periods when gold didn't restrain the creation of paper money.  In term of the inflationary tendencies over those periods when gold didn't restrain the creation of paper money....
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> We have fundamental reasons for owning gold, not rooted in emotions or chart reading, but based on literally thousands of years of worldwide acceptance of gold as a medium of exchange and store of value.  Over the centuries, going back to biblical times, god has maintaned its purchasing power while an untold number of paper currencies ('fiat" i.e. "unbacked") have come and gone.  the paper currencies' lives were defined invariably by how long it took the politicians of the time to debase or dilute the unbacked medium of exchange, and that continues to be the case.
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> From 1792, until 1971 when President Nixon closed the exchange window, the paper dollars were exchangeable into a fixed amount of gold, though FDR adjusted ('devaluing" the dollar) the $/oz exchange ratio in 1933.  From 1792 until 1914, when our Federal Reserve Bank was established to control inflation, there were 132 years of economic growth (almost 4% annually) with minimal inflation, and the budget under control except in wartime.  From 1914 until today, the dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power.  From 1971 (when we went to "pure paper" until today, the dollar has lost over 80% of its purchasing power...
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> We often ask ourselves what the "endgame" looks like as this "staglation" plays itself out.  This is a long term cycle, so timing is naturally uncertain.  This country will survive, and our families will survive, barring a nuclear or bio-chemical catastrophe.  However what will likely not survive the economic upheaval ahead will be the currency in which we transact business...
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> In sum, Roger believes that "gold discipline" will ultimately be necessary to fix the US and world economy.
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