Buying gold coins is more about preventing poverty than it is getting rich.

June 22, 2011 – Buying gold coins is more about preventing poverty than it is getting rich. And the aptly named misery index, which you get by adding inflation to unemployment, is a reliable indicator of the urgency of doing so.

Jimmy Carter brought the index to public attention in his 1976 campaign when he stated that an index of greater than 12.5% should take away an incumbents right to reelection. At the time the misery index was 13.7%, but under Carter it climbed to a record 22%.

CNBC reported that the index today, at 12.7%, is at its highest since 1983. But that is using the new gimmicked calculations that the Fed has adopted. Doing them the old way, Shadow Government Statistics’ John Williams puts inflation at 11.2% and unemployment at 22.3% – a misery index of a whopping 33.5%. “I believe we are in a depression right now and have been for a while,” Williams says.

While many economists blame oil prices for inflation, says Gregory Bresiger of the NY Post, according to Williams “the problem isn’t energy. The problem is the Federal Reserve printing too much. The problem is the government running huge deficits.”

Although others may hesitate to declare that we are in a depression, there is a broad concern “that economic problems go beyond rising prices … [that] inflation, combined with a weak recovery, could push the economy toward a double-dip recession.”

According to Pace University economics professor Joseph Salerno, “the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and job growth is far below the average job growth we have seen during recoveries.”

Monday’s mayors’ report concluded that it will take until 2014 just to reach prerecession employment levels in the Labor Department’s 363 metropolitan statistical areas, says The New York Times. And nearly 15% of those areas “are unlikely to bring back all the jobs lost in the recession until after 2020.”

Interestingly, “New York metropolitan region … will get back to its prerecession peak by 2013, in part because the financial sector did not lose as many jobs as feared,” says the Times. But “that could change as Wall Street, facing falling markets and an uncertain regulatory climate, plans further cuts to its work force.” Misery loves company, especially from Wall Street.

It looks like there will be plenty of misery to go around for quite some time. Unless you are partial to being miserable, take the antidote: buy gold coins.

Kevin Johnson

Senior Staff Writer – GoldCoin.net