Last month, hackers managed to get into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s computer system and swipe some $100 from a Bangladeshi government account.

As James Rickards pointed out in an interview last week on Fox Business, the vulnerability of digital wealth to hacking and cyber manipulation provides yet another reason to own gold. It is a tangible, physical asset that you can keep in your personal possession:

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There are new reasons to have gold…21st century reasons. Vladimir Putin has a 6,000-member cyber brigade working night and day to erase digital wealth. So many billionaires will say, ‘what do you have, stocks, bonds?’ No you don’t; you have electrons. Putin can wipe those out. The thing about gold, you can’t hack it, you can’t erase it, you can’t delete it. It’s tangible,”

The physical nature of gold also provides security for wealth in a world where central bankers and government officials are pushing toward a cashless society. Eliminating cash is all about control. It gives central bankers greater ability to manipulate behavior through negative interest rates, and it allows governments to limit access to your money like the Greek government did during that country’s economic meltdown. When you own gold, you hold your own wealth, free from government and bank control.

With this in mind, Rickards emphasized the importance of owning physical metal – coins and bars. He pointed out that many gold ETFs sell far more metal than they actually have:

One-hundred people show up and there is one bar of gold. One guy is getting the gold. Everyone else is shut out. So have physical gold, bullion, coins, American gold eagles…Put it in a safe place, not in the banks. Put it in private storage.”

During the Fox Business interview, Rickards also discussed Donald Trump’s recent comments regarding a looming recession. He agreed that economic trouble is likely coming down the pike, despite all of the mainstream economists and government officials claiming the US economy is in good shape:

There is a lot of social science research that says monkeys do better than economists at predicting because monkeys don’t know what they’re doing. They are 50% right. Economists herd and are wrong most of the time. The Fed has never predicted a recession; we’ve had many.So don’t listen to economists. Listen to executives. Trump may or may not be right, but I’d rather listen to an executive than an economist.”