USAWatchdog interviewed Hugo Salinas Price, a well-known and highly successful businessman operating in Mexico. Born in the United States, Price is now a passionate advocate for sound money and has been pushing for the Mexican government to adopt monetary silver again. Unfortunately, he sees far too much political pressure against sound money, particularly from the United States. But this shouldn’t stop savers from stockpiling their wealth in real money: gold and silver.

Highlights from the interview:

"When you have some intellectuals going so crazy as to say that they want to ban cash, you know that we can’t go too much further along this road. It’s utter madness…

"We have people running things [in the economy] who have forgotten about what motivates the common man. I’ve spoken to Congressman who are far left. I’ve sat down at a lunch table, and at first they regard me, because I have a certain amount of wealth, as suspicious. When I talk to them about silver, they come over to my side. They understand I want people to have silver, because it’s going to protect them… We were very close to monetization here [in Mexico], except I ignored one fundamental fact. The truth is – and I shouldn’t be saying this – but Mexico is very much under the control of the United States. We can’t go to silver money with the Fed looking over our shoulder… It’s politically impossible. We would have to have a revolution agains the United States, and that’s unthinkable…

"I just read today that world debt is something like $200 trillion, and it’s grown from the last crisis in 2008. They’re saying debt is too large to be paid off in the world. Something has to happen to take care of that debt. Either it’s going to repudiated, or it’s going to be inflated away, or it’s going to be paid with taxation…

"In 1975, 12.5 pesos would buy 1 dollar. A year later, the peso began to slide… I began telling people that the peso is going to bust. Nobody believed me until the very day that it happened, I was being ridiculed. That began in 1976… We are now at 15.1 pesos to the dollar — but don’t make a mistake… We are at 15,100 pesos to the dollar [in 1976 dollars]…

"[What happened to the peso is going to happen to the dollar]. Same causes, same effects. It’s unavoidable. That’s why I’ve been urging people to have silver and gold. I’ve been doing my best to have the silver coin monetized…

"People in government and economists, they don’t think much… They are occupied with the present and numbers and graphs and running models, but they’re not thinking… Government officials do not think, the Fed is not thinking, they are just doing what they’ve been taught to do…

"If Greece goes, there is going to be a chain reaction. The banks in Europe are going to be dreadfully affected. They’re going to want to improve their capital ratios, and how are they going to do that? Bring down some of the money that belongs to the depositors and appropriate it to bolster the bank. But what does it mean to most people? … Prices are going to go haywire. Business is going to stagnate. Unemployment is going to prevail… That’s what I see will happen. We are not going to get out of this mess easily…

"You need something to trade for what you need, and that is gold and silver. Especially gold… Most people will want to work with silver. Gold is for larger fortunes…

"People can’t visualize what moves people. Silver as money in the hands of the people — wow. That is the best promoter of prosperity that there could possibly be…"