RE: Gold21 Jul 2025 19:47
Knowing hospitals can be boring or stressful or some combination plse read the belie from Van Eck
In the first half of 2025 the gold price, as represented by the LBMA PM Gold Price, rose by 26%. This followed a 25.35% price rise in 2024.1
Coincidently, 2024 was when Wicked hit movie theatres. The film and its upcoming sequel are based on a Broadway musical, which in turn is based on a Gregory Maguire novel, Wicked. This book expands the well-known Wizard of Oz children’s book by L Frank Baum, and tells the untold story of what occurred prior to Dorothy’s arrival in the land of Oz.
The success of the film’s adaptations and the rise in the price of gold is coincidental yet has some interesting parallels. The original Wizard of Oz book written by L Frank Baum in 1900 was a political allegory about the 1896 US Presidential election between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. Gold was a central election issue. Since the Panic of 1893, the US had been in a deep depression. McKinley was a staunch activist for gold, and the gold standard.
So, how does this relate to the Wizard of Oz?
Irish economist and writer David Williams covers this topic in his book, Money, A Story of Humanity, where he states that, “In the film, we can read Oz, the evil wizard, as the embodiment of the banking elite and also a stand-in for gold, oz being the symbol for an ounce.”
According to Williams, The Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard itself. It is a path made of gold. Dorothy, from Kansas (geographically the middle of America) represents middle America. She is joined by a farmer (Scarecrow), an industrial worker (Tin Man) and the Democratic-Populist candidate William Jennings Bryan (The Cowardly Lion).
In the original book, as in the Broadway musical, before entering The Emerald City, you must put on green-coloured glasses. Green being the colour of money. “The conservative financiers who run the Emerald City, in other words, force its citizens to look at the world through money-coloured lenses,” states Williams.
Williams highlights other Wizard of Oz metaphors in his book, finishing with Dorothy’s return home.
In Baum’s book, Dorothy needed to click her silver shoes to return to Kansas at the end of the story (not red as in the 1939 film and in Wicked). The power to solve her (1896) problems were there all along – silver. Apparently, a looser, silver-backed currency was the answer in 1896.
The issue of what backs money and confidence in it has come to the fore in 2025. The days of the gold standard are long gone, but, so too has confidence, it seems, in the global reserve fiat currency - the US dollar.
Today, it seems, perhaps many central banks around the world are wearing shoes of gold, hoping to tap them if needed.
According to a recent article in The Australian, global central banks have purchased over 1,000 tonnes of gold annually for three years straight, about twice the average of the prev
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