June 11, 2015 04:36 PM UTC

Throwback Thursday: Walker Stapleton Says "Buy Gold!"

• 7 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Five years ago, now-Treasurer Walker Stapleton was locked in a tense primary battle against J.J. Ament, son of longtime Colorado political fixture Don Ament. In 2010, more or less all Republican candidates for office were working hard to prove their “Tea Party” mettle, which in practice meant the enthusiastic embrace of a smorgasbord of really extreme ideas–things that would sound just plain nutty in, say, 2015.

As you can see in the clip above, Walker Stapleton was no exception:

STAPLETON: The Treasury’s portfolio has not changed markedly in the last eight or ten years under Treasurer Mike Coffman, under Treasurer Mark Hillman and now under Treasurer Cary Kennedy. And that’s been okay, it’s weathered the storm fairly well. The problem is that we, I believe we are entering a hyper-inflationary environment. We’re going to need to shorten the duration of a lot of the state’s investments, the duration of the portfolio to adjust to a hyper-inflationary environment…

And I think hedging, using using gold to hedge against inflation or another precious metal is something the state needs to investigate. It’s something we haven’t done in the past, and it could be an effective method of dealing with a hyper-inflationary environment.

It’s important to remember the political climate on the right during the summer of 2010. The recent passage of the Affordable Care Act had been spun into a B-movie nightmare in which your grandmother and Sarah Palin’s disabled son were about to be put to death. The recent recession, which resulted from problems that began long before Barack Obama became President, was viewed as a precursor to a “socialist takeover” of the economy. Glenn Beck, then at the peak of his influence, warned right-leaning Americans of all these things and more–and urged them to buy gold to protect their wealth from destruction at the hands of the liberals subverting America.

And it all sounds…well, incredibly stupid now doesn’t it? Contrary to Stapleton’s dire predictions on the primary campaign trail, a “hyper-inflationary environment” never materialized. In fact, the overall economy has recovered strongly from the Great Recession. And it’s a good thing Stapleton never kept his pledge to buy gold with the state’s money, since gold has lost over a third of its value since its peak in 2011.

In all the years since, Stapleton has never been asked to explain these nutty remarks, but incidents like this help explain his amateurish flopping like a fish over a bill to shore up the state’s public employees retirement system–a bill he supported before the right wing made it known that he shouldn’t have.

There’s a good chance that Walker Stapleton simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and substitutes whatever he hears on talk radio for financial expertise.

At someday, that may well catch up with him.