By Mike Fuljenz
A recent episode of “Meet the Press,” a Sunday political talk show, opened with an interview of liberal billionaire hedge fund manager and campaign investor Tom Steyer.
Steyer has spent tens of millions of dollars on a televised ad campaign to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump, and Steyer plans to spend millions more on a digital ad campaign to call for the president’s impeachment.
Also, court documents were made public by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III detailing new allegations against Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer.
Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said these reports provide enough evidence for starting impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said these reports are “really concerning” and said she is interested in learning what else investigators will dig up now that Cohen, in a recent guilty plea, admitted that he lied to Congress about the work he did on a Trump Tower Moscow project in the middle of the campaign. “I’ve been supportive of impeachment for some time now,” she told reporters. “I think this just adds to the case.”
In 1972 through 1974, it took about two years from the Watergate break-in to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation for the forces of Congress and two investigative journalists at the Washington Post to bring a sitting president to resign, avoiding the inevitable vote against him in an impeachment trial.
If the impeachment process begins next year, we may see a replay of the 1973-1974 Nixon impeachment-era markets in 2019-2020. In 1973-1974, the Dow Industrial declined 45% from 1051.7 on January 11, 1973, to 577.6 on December 6, 1974. That coincided with one of the biggest bull markets in gold and rare coins. Gold more than tripled, from less than $60 to more than $180, while the Rare Coin CU 3000 index rose 348% – more than four-fold.
There was an impeachment threat in the Reagan years, too. On March 6, 1987, Representative Henry B. Gonzales, a democrat of Texas, introduced articles of impeachment against President Ronald W. Reagan regarding the Iran-Contra affair. It’s not well-remembered today, but there were hearings running for three months – from May 5 to August 6, 1987 – including testimony by Oliver North and others, followed by Congressional Committee meetings investigating Iran-Contra through the fall. The impeachment threat wasn’t over until the final committee report came out in November, after the stock market plummeted a startling 36%. At the same time, we saw the beginnings of a large bull market in rare coins. From 1986 to 1990, the Rare Coin CU 3000 Index rose 665% at a time when gold bullion and stocks were essentially flat.
The bottom line is that it has been prudent to buy rare coins when impeachment threats are in the air. As in both of those past episodes of political uncertainty and wild stock market gyrations, it seems to pay to take some stock market profits off the table and add to your coin collection. It never pays to wait too long since stocks can fall very fast, and truly high-quality rare coins can rise quickly in times of uncertainty.
Mike Fuljenz, president of Universal Coin & Bullion in Beaumont, Texas, is a leading coin expert and market analyst whose insightful writing and consumer advocacy have earned major honors from the ANA, PNG, NLG, and the Press Club of Southeast Texas. His website is UniversalCoin.com.
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