YoYou’ve got two choices. You can own currency. Or you can own energy… and I don’t trust the currency.
So, I choose to own energy. But how you choose to own that energy is the whole thing of what investing is about.
This is what Tom Dyson said to us in The Phoenician League’s members’ only call last week… and I find this perspective to be brilliant.
Dyson is a legend in the financial newsletter space. He’s largely considered an investment whiz throughout the industry. And Tom went on to share his holistic view with us last week.
Tom pointed out that energy is the master economic resource. Nothing happens without energy.
In that sense energy equals prosperity. Energy is what lifted hundreds of millions of people from the shackles of poverty and subsistence living.
So Tom’s investment philosophy is that all he wants to do is own energy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean energy companies.
Tom shared with us that he sees gold as a form of energy. That’s because gold is like a battery. It’s a way of storing energy for use later.
And what about land with coal, oil, gold, or other important minerals beneath it? Owning that land is a way to own energy. The same is true of land with high quality timber above it.
Then we can think about cargo ships and oil tankers – they are a form of realized energy. Indeed, all useful infrastructure is realized energy.
But we have to ask – why is this holistic view on energy important?
We talked last week about how the Federal Reserve created $8 trillion from nothing. Then the commercial banks pyramided credit on top of these new dollars. And then we saw the U.S. Treasury experiment with direct “stimulus” payments to U.S. citizens during the COVID-19 hysteria…
These things were only possible because the dollar is inelastic. The dollar’s supply is not fixed or limited. Instead, they can create new dollars from thin air at will.
The problem is, doing so diminishes the value of all dollars in circulation. Creating new dollars from nothing destroys the purchasing power of the dollar itself. That’s basic supply and demand economics.
We see this dynamic very clearly in the form of rising consumer prices. Houses… cars… groceries… fuel – most everything now costs more than it used to.
And that’s why Tom’s perspective on energy is so critical.
If we think the dollar is going to continue to lose value, then we need to own something tangible to protect our purchasing power. That means we want to own energy in some form.
I’ll leave it there for today… but we’ll talk about this idea in more detail this week.
And for those who are interested in having more detailed conversations along these lines – we’re hosting calls like the one we just did with Dyson every month in our investment membership The Phoenician League.
If you would like to explore our membership more, please sign up for our wait list right here. We’ll be opening our doors to new members soon.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. Tom Dyson currently serves as the Investment Director for Bonner Private Research. Anyone interested in following his investment research can find him on Substack at the following link: