Video News/In Focus with Jeremy Szafron

(Kitco News) - The government's expanded Treasury buyback program risks becoming another round of quantitative easing, and the gold held at Fort Knox would be better off in private hands, according to Dr. Ron Paul, former congressman and author of End the Fed. Speaking with Kitco News, Paul questioned whether the Treasury's move to triple its bond buybacks to $6 billion "might not turn into QE number two," and argued the government has grown into the market itself, a shift he described as corporatism. On the long-running debate over the Fort Knox gold reserves, Paul said the holdings cannot be fully trusted while the government controls both the metal and its stated value, telling Kitco News, "The people ought to own the gold, not the government." He also dismissed the idea that he would ever sell his own gold, invoking a friend's line that "true gold bugs never sell," and said a government attempt to restore the gold standard at a fixed price would fail without deeper reform because the underlying system, including spending and war, would remain unchanged. The current focus on "affordability," Paul added, distracts from the real issue: the falling value of the dollar. As he put it, "the market always wins" and sound money "always wins out over paper money."