Rick Rule has been doing this a long time…

Long enough that a single year, in his words, has become an irrelevant time frame for thinking about markets.

So when we caught up with him at this year’s Rule Symposium in Boca Raton – which Rule calls the longest-running natural resources, high net worth symposium in the world, save for the New Orleans conference – we asked him to look further out.

His answer starts with a decade most investors would rather not revisit: the 1970s. That decade, the U.S. dollar lost 75% of its purchasing power. Rule believes the next ten years could look similar – with $4,000 needed a decade from now to buy what $1,000 buys today.

For anyone living on a fixed income, a pension, or a bond portfolio built for steady income, Rule says that’s not an abstract number. It’s a reckoning.

Gold, he points out, ran 26-fold during that same stretch in the 1970s. He’s careful not to call for a repeat performance – but he does believe gold’s core function hasn’t changed: it holds its purchasing power when the dollar doesn’t.

Rule also weighed in on the macro backdrop driving this year’s symposium – a widening gap, in his view, between government promises and the balance sheets meant to fund them – and why he believes the investors who prepare for that gap now will be better positioned than those who don’t.

The conversation also covers:

• Why Rule believes a reckoning between government promises and government balance sheets is already underway
• What the 1970s can – and can’t – tell investors about the decade ahead
• Why Rule sees gold as a purchasing-power hedge, not a return prediction

Rick Rule is the founder of Rule Investment Media and host of the Rule Symposium, which he describes as the longest-running natural resources, high net worth symposium in the world, with the exception of the New Orleans conference. The symposium is backed by the Rule Classroom, a year-round education platform Rule says reaches 24,000 people.