Mike Maharrey: Greetings, I’m Mike Maharrey and I’m excited to be joined today by Peter C. Earl. He is the Director of Economics and Economic Freedom and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He has also had his boots on the ground, so to speak, working for more than 20 years as a trader and an analyst. How you doing today, Pete? Good.

Pete Earle: It’s great to be back, Mike. How’s everything?

Mike Maharrey: Doing great. And I’m really excited to talk to you today. I saw that you just recently published an article over at the AIER website on the gold standard, and I thought, man, this would be a great time to talk about the gold standard, because I think a lot of folks, even those who kind of intuitively think they like the gold standard, don’t necessarily understand it and the ramifications thereof. So, I’d really like to dig into that, and I really want to start basic. What do we mean by a gold standard? What exactly is that?

Pete Earle: Sure. So the gold standard is a monetary system in which the unit of account, whether that’s the dollar, the pound, the frank, the yen, whatever, is defined as a specific weight of gold. So, currency is not back to the vague sense. It means that every unit of currency is convertible at a legally fixed rate. And that convertibility means that every unit of money is anchored to a scarce, costly produce commodity, which means governments and banks, et cetera, don’t create money at will. And gold wasn’t chosen because it’s mystical or magical or anything like that, but because over many, many centuries and I guess millennia of market processes, gold is found to have basically all the properties that good money needs. It’s durable, it’s divisible, it’s portable, and most importantly, it’s credibly scarce. So basically under a gold standard, every unit of money is a claim on something that’s outside the political system.

Pete Earle: And what I like to tell interns at AIER is in a gold standard, money answers to geology, not to politics, not to elections.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I’ll take geology over politics any day. And I think you make a really good point. Even now, I mean, I don’t think nobody has a gold standard, but you can go anywhere in the world and hand somebody a gold coin and they’re going to want that. They may or may not want a dollar. They may or may not want a euro, but I can find pretty much any place you go, somebody who wants a little bit of gold. What are the advantages to a gold standard and why did that kind of evolve as the go- to over the centuries?

Pete Earle: Well, the thing is that under the opposite, or I guess what we’re using today, a fiat standard, what you have is you have money by decree, which means money has value because the government says it does, because it forces you to use it via legal tender rules. And less so, this issue gets brought up a lot. I think it’s less important than the legal tender laws, but because taxes have to be paid in it. And once money is severed from a hard constraint, it becomes inherently discretionary. So, central banks, whether they have a single or dual mandate, whatever, they’re constantly under pressure to err on the size of easing bailouts, stimulus, all that sort of thing. And what that creates and has created is an inflationary bias. Basically, in every nation in the world, there’s an inflationary bias. Now, that doesn’t mean hyperinflation, but it means the persistent erosion of purchasing power and recurring asset bubbles.

And so when you have a gold standard, you avoid just about all of that. You may even have a mildly deflationary economy over time where prices are slowly falling over time. There’s several kinds of deflations, but it’s a very, very different economic system and a very, very different basis for money when you have backing by a commodity than when you have just paper money that’s really at the discretion of some monetary technocrats.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. That sounds like a much better system. So then, that raises the $64,000 question, referencing the game show for those of us of a certain age. And that question is this: if a gold standard’s so great and it evolved over time, why did they get rid of it?

Pete Earle: Well, I mean, I think all the things that I pointed out were a benefit to it are not very desirable by governments. Governments don’t want to be bound to limits on their spending. They don’t want to not have ways of papering over the errors they make, whether those are inflationary, whether those are debt or whatever. And so for that reason, gold was always sort of like a, they call it like the glittering or the golden feathers that states were ultimately going to get rid of. But my view has been for a long time, and I’ve written about this at AIR, that whether we talk about moving from the classical gold standard to the gold exchange standard, to the managed gold standard, to the Britain wood standard, and then to the field standard, I always believe, and I still believe, that we are in an interregnum right now.

What I mean by that is that eventually gold will have to come back, maybe silver, some other commodity back currency probably wind up being gold again because there’ll be no choice. I do believe that this is not a permanent change, but one that may take, as it’s taken other places, 50, 100, 150 years, eventually gold will come back, not because people wanted to, but because it has to make forward progress in terms of economics.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I kind of want to dig into that a little bit. I’ve got a couple questions about that towards the end, but I want to put a bookmark right there because I think that’s a very significant point that you made, and I actually very much agree with that. But kind of looking at the today, so we have a world, the entire world is on a fiat standard. We have different fiat currencies. We have euros, we have yuan, we have dollars, and gold has been … It’s still part of the financial system, but it’s kind of been pushed off to the side. I have often said that a fiat system is the engine that drives big government. Would you agree with that?

Pete Earle: Absolutely. Those natural constraints on how much spending can be done. I mean, any government that’s on a gold standard simply cannot be all things to all people. Hard choices have to be made about where to spend, when to spend. And I mean, proof of that is the fact that for many hundreds of years, many countries had a gold standard. They would go off the gold standard when they went to war and then when wars and they went back onto it. That’s proof that you can’t just live with no limits on supply and demand anymore. We haven’t defeated supply and demand. So as long as that’s the case, right? I mean, eventually we find out either because the money gets printed into basically valuelessness or because we go back on a gold standard and we retrieve that sort of historical tie to value that growing economies have typically had.

But I mean, you can’t spend forever. And the gold standard makes that very clear.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Math wins.

Pete Earle: Absolutely.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. So let’s talk about some of the myths, because if you bring up the gold standard, and I have, and these are going to be very familiar to you, but you get this refrain. And one of the first ones I get, well, if we have a gold standard, then the government can’t respond to an emergency. How would you respond to that objection?

Pete Earle: Right, right. My answer would be, so you’re saying the first emergency ever was 1931 or so. I mean, come on, we’ve had emergencies for years and years. I mean, I don’t consider a war an emergency. War is a voluntary spasm that governments bring upon themselves, but they went off gold for that and then they went back on. Gold persisted through the bubonic plague. I mean, it’s simply not true that we’ll be caught flat footed in an emergency if we were stuck with a gold standard. And the other thing is, if you look at most of the times, many government reactions to emergencies, they wind up making things worse a lot of the time. To some extent, that ability to print money at will makes it such that they can react quickly, but thoughtlessly. And for that reason, I think they wind up being more harm than good.

But that’s a standard one and that’s kind of the one that will always be … I think that’s the 11th hour excuse. But what if there’s an emergency?

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, there are always emergencies.

Pete Earle: Yeah, exactly. I mean, since human beings decided to gather in sedentary groups and farm, there have been emergencies that crop up occasionally and fiat money is a relatively new invention that hasn’t made that irrelevant.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I think you make a really good point too. A lot of times I think it would be better if the government didn’t respond to the emergency and let regular people figure it out. COVID’s a great example of that, right?

Pete Earle: We had spontaneous order, local knowledge, all of those things matter.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I mean, we had a situation in the COVID era where the governments were able to basically shut the economy down only because they could print money. And now, I think most people who are marginally sane look back on that and realize that maybe completely shutting down the government wasn’t such a good plan

Pete Earle: Shutting down the economy was an awful, awful idea. And we’re still today living with many of the consequences of that decision.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s one thing. Okay. So another objection that I often get is that if we don’t have fiat money, then we can’t expand the money supply. And if we don’t expand the money supply, prices might start dropping and that’s bad. Which I think most, again, same people look at that and go, wait a minute, I think it’d be good if some prices dropped in my life, but that’s what they’ll tell you.

Pete Earle: So, what I would say to them is that the idea that falling prices are inherently harmful is at odds with most of history. In reality, price declines usually happen because of productivity, right? And we still see that today in electronics. I could buy the same laptop today a year from now for a lower price or for the same money, I can buy a better laptop next year. It used to be when we had a gold standard that that was the same in everything. Imagine if the same trajectory in prices you see with electronics or with certain, very limited class of goods, TVs, computers, imagine if that was the case with cars, with your house, with food, with everything else. So that’s a sign, falling prices, gently falling prices are a sign of economic progress. Under sound money, you tend to get falling prices that increase real incomes and they reward saving without destroying demand.

Now, the other issue is that we do see deflation sometimes. We haven’t seen it very often, but a lot of times we’ve seen deflation that happens when a central bank will suddenly shut down … They suddenly will do something that basically, like early in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and they basically within 18 months or so, the money supply was down by, I think, a third or so. Now that causes the deflationary crunch and that’s very bad. Now, we can still grow out of that, but the general deflationary downslope of the general price level is a very healthy thing. And it’s something that I think most of the time it’s economists who talk about that because if you were to talk to the average person on the street about that, they’d say, “Wait, so I keep the same income and my price is a little lower next year, sign me up. I want more of that. ” Unfortunately, right now, we only get it in technology.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I was at Walmart the other day with my wife and we were walking through the electronics section, just to go to your point, and there was a giant big screen TV. I mean, like the size of a movie theater screen, something that we would never even put in our house because our house just wouldn’t even fit it. And it was like, I don’t know, $500. And I remember when the 44 inch we got was like $1,000 TV. So you make a very good point there. We see that. Absolutely. When the government doesn’t get its little sticky fingers involved in things.

Pete Earle: Right, right, right, right.

Mike Maharrey: Okay. So here’s another one that I’ll hear that if we have a gold standard, then the economy can’t grow because the money supply has to grow with the economy.

What’s wrong with that idea?

Pete Earle: Yeah, there’s two versions of that. One is that we need an expanding money supply for a growing economy, and another is that gold is a metal that can’t support a modern complex economy with AI and with quantum computing and all that. And the answer is that the money doesn’t need to expand to increase GDP. Prices adjust and more goods and services can be supported by the same or even a slowly growing money supply through lower prices. I would ask people, consider the leap we made, and this ties to the later one about, can gold support a technological economy such as we have today. Consider the leap from Roman times or even earlier to the year 1900, right? I mean, that’s the leap through the dark ages, through the industrial revolution. We’re at the dawn of aviation. We’ve got trains and gold saw us through all of that.

So, there’s no reason it couldn’t today. That’s a little bit of, I would say, technological or technocratic arrogance, the idea that gold somehow wouldn’t support us in an age of AI and all that sort of thing. It would probably make our spending more targeted and a little more sane. We probably wouldn’t have the asset bubbles we have building right now, which that would restrict the likelihood that we see some mal investment on the way. But even so, I mean, there’s nothing that’s happening today that gold wouldn’t support or gold or I mean any commodity backed metal really, but gold is the best of that breed of that type.

Mike Maharrey:

Yeah. And couldn’t you argue that the innovations that we’ve had technologically actually would make a gold standard a little bit easier because in an electronic system, you can actually easily trade fractional bits of gold? You don’t have to have the one gram of gold. You can account for it much easier.

Pete Earle:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there’s a few more objections, but one I get a lot also is people say, “Well, there’s not enough gold for the amount of money out there.” As long as we can cut it into finite pieces or to keep account of it digitally, there’s plenty of gold for the amount of money we have today. Absolutely.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that was going to be a question. I’ll go ahead and since we’re on the subject, touch on that because that’s an objection if you talk about, well, maybe we ought to think about returning to some kind of sound money or gold standard and that’ll be, well, there’s not enough gold. Wouldn’t you just basically have to revalue it at a number that’s big enough?

Pete Earle: Absolutely. And of course, nobody’s going to go to the bank and trade in $1 for a spec of gold. I mean, if they wanted to, they could, get out your microscope. But I mean, no, no, it’s just a question of how many pieces it gets divided into. And there would be some cost to making that change, but I mean, when you look at the cost, even the cost of, not just of inflation and everything in the economy, if you look at the cost just of managing the Fiat money system or the cost of the Federal Reserve, the losses on the balance sheet, the whole scope of those costs, the cost of converting to gold would be comparably small. It’d be much lesser on that scale.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I mean, what are the costs that we’re paying now in this fiat system just in- Tremendous. … the degradation of our purchasing power.

Pete Earle: I would argue the opportunity cost is such that it should make us blush. So yeah.

Mike Maharrey: Okay. So what’s another objection or two that maybe I’m missing?

Pete Earle: Yeah. So one is that in a gold standard, you have hoarding, which starts the economy of spending. People put their money in gold and they don’t move it. So the fact is that gold will reward saving, which finances real investment rather than speculative credit. And again, you mentioned the one about emergency spending, the flexibility, but that flexibility means shifting costs onto citizens through inflation. And an interesting one, here’s an interesting one I’ve heard is that with the gold standard, the institutions that would kind of be in charge of the monetary system are gold mining firms, and that’s an interesting observation. And my answer to that would be not really, but even so, I’m willing to give the gold mining firms a shot given what we’ve seen politicians and central banks do. I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll figure out how that works.

I mean, I think they deserve a shot at the top position. Of course, tongue in cheek, but I’m not worried about gold firms mismanaging the money supply. They can’t create gold out of thin air. And so right there, that takes away a huge ability to do pernicious things.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also that the reality of it is, is that the motivation and incentives are different. For a politician, it’s all about power. Sure. The mining firm just wants to mine gold, make money.

Pete Earle: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Maharrey: Which I guess some people might frown at that as some kind of moral down-falling, but I think you and I would disagree with that.

Pete Earle: I mean, if you look at the scope of ills associated with central banking, to point any sort of a jaundiced finger at gold mining firms takes a lot of gall. I mean, you have to really leap to make that assertion. It’s hard to make that leap. It’s hard to make it.

Mike Maharrey: The whole hoarding thing to me kind of defies human psychology too, because I mean, I do think that I would be more inclined to save if I knew that that saving was going to hold its value over time. I think that’s a fair assessment of that incident. But I still want stuff, right? I mean, I still want a car.

Pete Earle: So that’s one of the bases upon which many economists have sort of poked holes in one element of the Keynesian paradigm. So, Keynes said that eventually, if prices fall fast, this was his argument against deflation. If prices fall fast enough, people will basically just sit on their money until they think it reaches the bottom or until it’s … And the answer is no. No, no, no. We still have to buy food. I still have to buy gas for my car. There’s always some low level buzz, some low level degree of consumption activity, which then we rebound from. So, for that reason, the hoarding thing, basically it doesn’t hold a lot of water. That’s not a really good argument. And the other thing is that money is one of the … So, money is a good like any other. It can be evaluated against others on the market.

We have that all the time, dollars versus other currencies, that sort of thing. I think what’s important to know is that money is doing its job even when it’s not being spent. Money sitting in my pocket is exerting force. Money sitting in the bank is exerting an influence on all the other money out there by being withheld from supply. So, for that reason, hoarding is a huge part. In fact, we shouldn’t even call it hoarding. Let’s just call it saving, right? Savings is a huge part of what makes money worth and what gives money its value and its value in terms against other currencies and that sort of thing.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Calling it hoarding is kind of one of those gaslighting things

Pete Earle: That’s bad to say. Exactly. Right.

Mike Maharrey: Right. I was thinking too, just in terms of the falling price idea, like you mentioned computers and I can be pretty confident that if I wait till next year, I’m going to be able to get an even better computer maybe at a lower price or probably the computer that I’m looking at now for a lower price in a year. But that doesn’t change the fact that my computer’s broken. I still need a computer. There’s demand for these things.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah.

Pete Earle: I mean, I’m not a fan of the Keynesian ideas. I see where they were derived from. Some of them superficially make sense, but when you look at them more closely through the really finally tuned economic perspective, again, they don’t really have any veracity. I mean, there’s never going to be a time when people are basically going to sit down and say, “I’m not spending, period.” Could never happen.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Do you think that the whole concept of money is kind of muddled in people’s heads? Because I find that people kind of equate money with wealth. That’s the end goal. And for me, money for me, first off, it’s a way to compensate me for my labor so that I can basically save my labor. And then it’s also a means for me to get stuff. I mean, that’s ultimately what I want. I don’t want a piece of paper or even a piece of metal. What I want is a nice house and I want a car and I want good food and I want clothes, I want to go to the hockey game, all of those things. And I think sometimes we look at money as the final object as opposed to what it really is. It’s kind of a tool, right?

Pete Earle: Money is an incredible social technology and it’s a tool. And even beyond saving and spending and investing, money is what MESAs call a tool for the mind. In other words, I think of money as an exchange ratio, right? I think that this object is worth more than my say $5. The other person says, “This object is worth a lot less than me than $5.” We both trade. I give them my five bucks. They give me the good or service that I wanted and we both win. I mean, it’s an amazing tool for coordination. It makes long term production processes possible. Whenever I hear somebody say, “Money stinks or money is a root of all evil or money corrupts.” I want to say that person, and I’ve said it a few times and kidding around, but I’ve said, “If you really think that money is that bad, spend a week under barter.

Pete Earle: Spend a month under barter and then tell me what you think. I challenge you.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I would argue that money makes us better human beings in some ways because it allows you and I to peacefully make exhanges.

Pete Earle: I mean, so many people who you might see for whatever reason you might say, “Yeah, I either don’t like that person’s politics or I don’t like their whatever.” They’ve got a good service. There you go. We both benefit and it takes a lot of the emotional and cultural and all the other sort of potential sources of friction out of social interaction. It’s an amazing … I mean, once you learn, and I’m sure you have, all of us around the gold and all this specific area of economics, all of us who spend time around this, I find myself now, 30 years into this career, marveling at the genius of money, just the genius of this social technology, and I’m learning more about it all the time.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. That’s the beauty of it. There’s always more to learn.

Pete Earle: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Maharrey: You mentioned earlier that you think that the fiat era that we’re in now is likely temporary. And I think it’s three shows that fiat systems tend to collapse.

Pete Earle: That’s right.

Mike Maharrey: And so the question I was going to ask is, do you think it’s possible to return to a gold standard? Obviously that you do, and maybe it’s inevitable. Looking at today’s landscape, we’re seeing a very rapid increase in central bank gold buying, particularly among emerging market economies, among economies who I think are wary of the dollar, which is the king of the fiats right now.

Pete Earle: Sure.

Mike Maharrey: Yep. Do you think that this growing interest in gold and the growing gold reserves is in fact a concession to sound money that, yeah, we do need this?

Pete Earle: I think that it is, although nobody would admit it is. The central banks buying it are buying it because they became terrified, largely because they became terrified about three and a half years ago when the US government, the treasury, pressured Swift to kick Russian banks out of the dollar messaging system. What that did was it told a lot of nations, I mean, adversaries and allies, including some Western European nations, that dependence upon the dollar is a potential liability. Your reliance on the dollar could wind up costing you. So what we’re seeing today is, I think, is structural repricing rather than a short-lived cyclical move. I think it’s being driven from, like I said, some geopolitical fragmentation and concerns, but also by fiscal deficits, growing skepticism about long run monetary discipline. And these central bank purchases, which range from emerging markets to large nations that we have dealings with every day is a diversifying move.

And whether or not they call it that, it is a nod to sounder money, whether it’s viewed as a place to hide assets or to be able to shift to while you’re thinking of a new way to trade or coming up with new trading systems if you get kicked out of the dollar system, or whether it’s just as a store of value, I definitely think that that’s what’s happening right now. And this is not just a spike. We have nine eleven and 2008, you had spikes in gold, and usually that results in higher lows and higher highs, but this is a 60 to 70% increase. This is a real restructuring of the perception of gold. And we see it in silver too. Silver is over $65 an hour now, which is incredible.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, $66 as of today (Wednesday Dec. 17)

Pete Earle: Right. So I mean, I think this is happening on a number of fronts. Silver’s a little more of a sticky situation because it’s kind of a populous metal. It’s not the same as gold. It’s still valuable and scarce, but it’s a cousin to gold that’s not a brother or sister. So, different reasons.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I’ll tell you a funny story in, I think it was 2018, I did an interview on RT, which I know is a no-no. I probably shouldn’t even admit it because that makes me a Russian agent. I had actually written an article way back then about the ramifications of using the dollar as a foreign policy billy club. And I specifically mentioned the possibility of somebody locking a country being locked out of the SWIFT system. And when I did it, I got fact checked by … As it turns out, it’s one of these … It’s basically a CIA front kind of publication, but they swore no way ever would the US lock a country out of Swift that that would not happen and that I was a nut. So I guess chalk one up for the nuts, right?

Pete Earle: Yeah. I mean, we all want to be nuts an hour later, right? I mean, it eventually happens to all of us.

Mike Maharrey: So from an American standpoint, and I’ll get you out on this one because we’re running short on time, but I want to touch on the current state of things. You hear a lot of talk about de-dollarization. You hear about the SWIFT whole thing. We’re seeing countries looking for alternatives to that SWIFT system and things like that. Do you think that de-dollarization at this point is a legitimate threat? A lot of people say it’s not, that it’s overhyped. And what in your mind are the ramifications of even a moderate de-dollarization? It’s not talking about all of a sudden the dollar is not the reserve, but just what do they call it? A multipolar financial system is what some people call it. What are the Ramifications?

Pete Earle: So, I wrote an article in April of 2023 about de-dollarization and completely unplanned by me, unbeknownst to me at the time, it went absolutely viral. I didn’t expect for it to, but so de-dollarization is a real phenomenon because the dollar is so deeply entrenched everywhere in the world in finance and because our bonds are so widely distributed as risk collateral and that sort of thing, it is happening, but at very slow pace, I think the likely outcome is a combination of things. Yes, a more multipolar sort of world, but the thing is that the dollar is still pretty much the only game in town in terms of global currencies. The Fed has done a terrible job managing the dollar. Most other central banks are way worse, and that’s hard for people to get their minds around, but it’s true. But the thing is gold to a lesser extent, crypto, silver, all of those things I think will gain greater importance, especially for those BRICS nations that just don’t want to be associated with the debt empire that we’ve built for whatever reason.

They may be willing to trade with us, but when they get those dollars back, they’d rather put them in another form. And you can understand why, especially after the last five years.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Am I off track when I say that even this moderate drop in demand for dollars is problematic because of the fact that we depend on that demand in order to keep the money machine printing machine going?

Pete Earle: Less demand for the dollar means eventually less demand for treasury bills and short-term notes, which is how we keep on spending. I’ve seen that spending, the Fed has to take those things onto their books. It has to take them off the balance sheet, and that becomes a whole other issue. So yeah, even a small decrease in the demand for dollars has macroeconomic consequences.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I’m glad I’m not off track there because people tell me I am. I’m sure you deal with a lot of that as well because we’re not exactly- Yeah, it comes along. We’re not exactly toeing the mainstream line right now. Yeah.

Pete Earle: Right, right.

Mike Maharrey: Alright, well, I really do appreciate your insight and wisdom. I think this was a great crash course for folks on the gold standard. Before I go, I do want to give you the opportunity to, first off, just give a quick overview of what you guys do over at the American Institute for Economic Research, and then also let folks know where they can follow your work and find your writings and avail themselves to your knowledge.

Pete Earle: Sure. So, AIER (AIER.org) is an independent nonprofit economic research and education organization. We’ve been around since 1933, which makes us one of the oldest, is not the oldest in the United States. We cover things like sound money, economic freedom, personal responsibility, very limited government, that sort of thing. I’m the director of economics and economic freedom. We have articles on our website called The Daily Economy Every Day. My work can be found there, as well as I am on Twitter, although I’m a very very sporadic user of it. And my name there is @peter_C__Earl, E-A-R-L-E. And yeah, great podcast like this is where I can be found.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you being a part of this. We’ll call it a great podcast. I don’t know. That’s for other people.

Pete Earle: I think so. I think you’re there.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Well, definitely enjoyed the discussion. We’d love to have you back. This is my wheelhouse. I like the big macro picture. I’m not like the technical analyst guy that gets into the charts and stuff that goes- Neither am I. Yeah. But I do. And I think this is important. This is the foundation. If people are trading, investing, this is the framework that you have to operate in. Everything else falls under this. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Well, you take care of yourself. I hope you have a great holiday season. And again, thank you and we’ll have you back at some point in the near future.

Pete Earle: You too. Thanks so much, Mike.