That was the line made famous in the film, "All the President's Men," starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The movie was based on the book by the same name, authored by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein. The essence of the infamous line was that during the Watergate scandal involving president Richard M. Nixon, Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Hoffman) attempted to track the flow of campaign contributions to uncover one of the biggest scandals in political history.
That was in the early 1970s. More than 50 years hence, Washington is more scandalous than ever, money is at a scale that dwarfs the piddling amounts that changed hands just after Nixon closed the gold window and took the world off the gold standard. The difference today is that while there may be no scandal or multiple ones, money, or rather, the flow and nature of money holds clues to the future of economics, politics, society, and the world.
Here are a few clues. Banks have lots of it. Money is flowing into gold and silver. Money is flowing out of bitcoin and crypto.
This tells us that money is on the move and also that its nature is changing. As Mike Maloney of goldsilver.com so frequently points out, money is a misnomer for what people use to buy and sell things. The correct and preferred term is "currency," and in that regard, fiat currencies - dollars, yen, euros, pounds - are being traded for actual money, which is gold, and silver.
It's useful to note that gold and silver have been considered money in countries around the world for literally thousands of years. Only recently has fiat currency, created out of nothingness by central banks like the Bank of England, the ECB, and the U.S. Federal Reserve, been cherished and regarded as ultimate reserve currencies. These currencies, backed by nothing more than faith and trust in various governments and their central bank issuers, are rapidly losing what little is left of their purchasing power. In a word, they are dying and will, at some point, no longer be used to buy and sell goods and services. Their replacements - as hard as it is to believe by the global population blinded by normalcy bias - are gold and silver.
This transition doesn't happen overnight. It takes, years, even decades, before the conversion from bad money to good makes a full trip. Gresham's law tells us that bad money drives out good. Currency of lower intrinsic value (bad money) will be used for transactions, while the currency with higher intrinsic value (good money) will be saved or exported. That is exactly what is happening with the price of gold and silver.
Look at it this way: The price of gold and silver aren't actually going up; the purchasing power of the currency by which people - hopefully you - are buying them is going down.
As far as bitcoin and crypto, which aren't money or even currencies, are concerned, it looks to be dead.
This all becomes a heck of a lot easier if you pay attention.
Oh, BTW, those regional banks like Zions (ZION), Western Alliance (WAL), Flagstar (FLG), and Banc of California (BANC) are in trouble again, this time for making loans to shady people, which, if there's anything that defines banks throughout history, is what they usually do, because, as a whole, bankers are willfully, woefully stupid and cheat each other and their customers with cavalier disregard for moral behavior.
In any case, it being Friday, it's customary to see how the various indices have fared thus far. For the week, through Thursday's close, the Dow is up 472 points, the NASDAQ is up 358, and thre S&P 500 is ahead some 76 points.
So, why worry?
At the Close, Thursday, Octoebr 16, 2025:Dow: 45,952.24, -301.07 (-0.65%)
NASDAQ: 22,562.54, -107.54 (-0.47%)
S&P 500: 6,629.07, -41.99 (-0.63%)
NYSE Composite: 21,376.96, -193.96 (-0.90%)
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