In addition to his day job as a strategic planner with an Ivy League university, James Quinn has, in the past year, become one of the Web’s handful of must-read bloggers. Nearly everything he publishes ends up in the DollarCollapse “Best of the Web” column, and his Burning Platform website now hosts high-level discussions on topics ranging from Peak Water to Washington’s fraudulent employment numbers to Swiss bank dumping of U.S. bonds. We spoke earlier in the week:

DollarCollapse: The first article on your Burning Platform website is less than a year old. Since then you’ve been churning out big, thought-provoking, well-researched articles at the rate of about one a week. What happened to suddenly make you such a prolific blogger?

James Quinn: I’d never written an article in my entire life until April 2008. The reason I started was, I was watching the Republican presidential primaries and I saw how the mainstream press and the other candidates were treating Ron Paul. I’d never heard of Ron Paul until Richard Russell  brought him up in his newsletter. I started investigating, and everything the guy wrote was dead-on, completely consistent with my point of view. And during the campaign they were treating him like a nut, when he was the most honest straightforward guy in the campaign. So I wrote an article titled “Why We Need Ron Paul.” I tried to get it published in some newspapers but nobody wanted any part of it. Then I came across Lew Rockwell’s site and he loved it and posted it. His site gives out its writers’ email addresses so I started getting 50 emails a day, most of them agreeing with me. So I kept going. The first five or six articles were all Ron Paul based, and Lew put them on his site. Then Seeking Alpha and Minyanville and your site picked them up.

Then I came across this guy named Jason Rines, who had created a site called Raging Debate, which had used a couple of my articles. I mentioned that I’d like to do a site that would include discussion threads and he said, “I’ll create it for you.” He put together the Burning Platform. I came up with the name and supply the content, and he built the discussion capabilities. Jason’s idea is to roll out these sites for anybody who has something to say. He’ll provide the technology and they’ll provide the content.

DC: Your articles cover a lot of ground, but the central theme is always the mess we’ve made of things. How in your opinion did we screw up so royally?

JQ: It comes back to 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. Before that we were a manufacturing-based economy. We produced things, and we ran a trade surplus, not a deficit. But [disconnecting the dollar from gold] unleashed the Federal Reserve to print at will, and they have. Since then we’ve had nothing but inflation. The dollar has lost 93% of its value against gold.

We did fine from 1789 to 1913. We had strong growth without inflation. But when we created the Federal Reserve it was for the benefit of the bankers and politicians. It has allowed them to spend freely and create a welfare system that has skyrocketed. But you can’t let the rest of us off the hook. We’ve continued to vote for politicians who promised all the goodies without the pain. That’s how you get reelected today.

DC: You’re especially hard on us baby boomers. What did we do to make you so mad?

JQ: In 1980 the oldest boomer turned 35, and since then they’ve led us into a debt bubble. Every conceivable category of debt has skyrocketed. Now there’s a tipping point coming. As John Mauldin says, “an unsustainable trend will not be sustained.” At some point it’s going to come crashing down.

I have three teenage boys and for the first time in a long time I don’t think our kids are going to have a better future than we had. We’re saddling our children and grandchildren with $66 trillion of unfunded liabilities and still piling it on.

Everything this government is doing is the opposite of what it should be doing. With cash for clunkers and tax credits for houses we’re encouraging people to borrow more. They’re coming out with another for appliances later in the year. The debt is going to go up by $2 trillion this year. Ultimately it leads to a dollar collapse. I can’t see any other out at this point.

DC: If a crisis is unavoidable, what’s your most likely scenario?

JQ: Our standard of living drops dramatically. I keep reading about the government hitting the reset button and devaluing the dollar. Could they do what Roosevelt did in 1932 and confiscate gold and reset the dollar 50% lower to wipe out all the debt that we owe? That would be a choice on the part of the government, which is possible, but I don’t think they’re that smart. So I think it’s more likely to be a collapse where someone heads for the exits and everyone else follows. The Chinese and the Russians are already headed for the exits, but they’re doing it slowly and cautiously so they don’t cause a panic.

DC: What are you doing with your own money?

JQ: We’re putting three kids through school and have almost no debt. I’m mostly in inflation protected bonds. Our biggest stock positions are GLD and SLV, the ETFs for gold and silver. I think commodities are going to skyrocket, so I’ve got the commodity ETF DBA and a few gold mining stocks. But at this point I’m a lot in cash. I think the overall market heads back to its March lows and beyond.

DC: One last question: Your perspective is Austrian, or libertarian, or Constitutional or whatever other right-wing nutcase label you prefer. That’s generally not the dominant culture of an Ivy League school. Do your bosses read your stuff, and if so, what’s their reaction?

JQ: I keep a very low profile.

The precious metals juniors have had a nice pop in the past few months. But according to David Morgan, veteran silver analyst and publisher of The Morgan Report, the real fun is just beginning. We spoke recently about why the sector has a bright future and how to tell the real companies from the story stocks.

DollarCollapse: Why do the juniors look good right now?

David Morgan: First of all, they’re still undervalued. There are projects out there that are selling for less than their cash on hand. Many more are selling for less than a reasonable liquidation value. Once you’re on the floor you can push as hard as you want and you’re not going below the floor, so the juniors look like the best part of the resource sector at the present time.

The only negative is that we’re approaching more volatility in all the markets. There is a possibility in my view that there could be one more smashing of the general financial sector. The large miners tend to go along with the general equity market. So a huge sell-off in the stock market in October would damage the large cap miners such as Newmont Mining and GoldCorp. Will it take down the juniors? Probably not. You might see some of these stocks sell off a bit, but they’re already washed out.

DC: How big a part of the story is M&A, with the majors buying up the juniors?

DM: It’s a very big part of the story. Basically when the credit crunch started to manifest globally in 2008, companies that had cash positions were sitting like vultures on the telephone line looking at the companies with good projects that were selling at less than asset value. Lots of mergers and acquisitions took place. The big companies didn’t have any problem at all getting credit.

But I don’t spend a lot of time looking for potential takeovers. I approach these companies on a value basis. With commodities, whether you get metal out of the ground in Canada or South Africa, it’s all the same, it’s fungible. So with a big company what you want to look for is the balance sheet and income statement. Who’s making the most profit on the same product? I’m simplifying but that gives you the general idea. But move down to the juniors and that’s more of an art, a much more difficult process. Where are they, who’s managing it, how much cash do they have in the bank, have they done it before? But some of these projects are only so far advanced and they’re in good shape but are sitting there without anyone other than bigger companies paying attention.

DC: But you don’t like “story stocks”…

DM: I’m conservative, which comes with experience. I started in this sector at a very early age and was going to  get rich quick. I bought every penny stock on the Vancouver exchange that I had money for, and my thinking was that if I just picked the right juniors it would just be a question of waiting a fixed amount of time and these things would go to the moon. But then I calmed down, saw my losses, and started to learn more. The truth of the matter is that on a grassroots exploration company your shot is about one in 2,000. That’s better than the lottery but it’s not as advantageous as a lot of people think. So part of my job is to separate the real companies from the story stocks. Again, I want to state that I am not primarily a junior mining stock picker, I focus much more on making money safely in the sector much like someone managing a gold fund, but we do not manage money.

DC: What do you need to see in order to move a company from story to real?

DM: You need to see the story coming true according to plan. There’s a sweet spot to buy a stock and it’s always higher than where it was when it started. When a company is just an idea or a great story, that’s usually as cheap as it’s going to get. Very few great stories come true, but if it begins to come true, the market will bid it up. But it can still be undervalued. And once you know a lot about it, let’s say 80% comes true and the other 20% is coming, there’s a point where there’s enough volume and news and knowns-versus-unknowns that you can buy the stock pretty safely and still see a lot of upside. I’d rather buy a $2 stock that goes to $8 in a year than a stock at 12-cents that takes ten years to go to $8.

We had Silver Standard (SSRI), for instance, at 65 cents. I was one of the first other than Adrian Day to recommend it, but [later on] you could buy that stock at $5 and still have a lot of upside. They kept adding shares but at the same time they were adding more silver ounces per share. So there’s your sweet spot: For a while you could buy something that was getting more undervalued the more shares they issued.

DC: So who are the next Silver Standards out there?

DM: I don’t think there will be another Silver Standard for a while but I’ll give you a conservative pick. Energold (EGD.V) is a drilling company with a unique drill that’s used all over the world. It’s a very efficiently run company, with management that’s excellent. The sweetener on this one is that it owns a pretty good percentage of Impact Silver (IPT.V). They’re mining silver at a profit, a small operation with lots of growth potential. So you’ve got an operating company with solid contracts and a pretty good slice of Impact Silver. This is as solid a speculation as any on our list.

One of my earliest recommendations is Mines Management (MGN). I know the management quite well. It’s developing a huge property, over a billion pounds of copper and a quarter million ounces of silver in Montana. It’s not a super-rich project. It’s been advanced substantially over the last several years but they’re not mining yet. If something happens in the future they don’t have a fallback position, so this adds to the risk. However, it’s so undervalued that it’s a reasonable speculation. If you put this on a graph of ounces in the ground per dollar invested it’s well undervalued relative to its peers. I own shares of both Energold and Mines Management.