Gold: The Only Wealth That Can’t Be Erased

Now, here's an interesting little bit of news:

From Juneau, Alaska comes word that a computer technician accidentally erased a disk drive containing information on $38 billion worth of accounts.

Bummer.

"That's what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account - one of Alaska residents' biggest perks - and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well."

We will not dwell on the incident. Fortunately, the revenuers had a back up somewhere. All was well...more or less.

But one of our colleagues posed a question to us that we will pose to you:

How rich would you be if Fidelity...or Merrill Lynch...or your pension company...or your mutual fund managers...destroyed all those little bits of electronic information that define your wealth?

"I was talking with an old friend of mine who is filthy rich - 8-figures kind of rich, before the decimal point," wrote our Pittsburgh correspondent, Byron King. " He makes $20,000 per day just in interest on funds he has sitting in a money market account. He was musing about what would happen if somebody set off a nuke at altitude, and the EMP wrecked the world's data storage network. ‘If you wiped out all the data storage at Fidelity, would I still be rich,' he asked?

"We pondered the question, and he is now accumulating gold."

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning Australia

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