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I don’t watch/read a lot of it, but I do take in a non-trivial amount of right wing content. Nothing fancy nor shmancy, just Fox, Drudge, AM radio, etc. I also take in a lot of other opinion/news sources, and it seems to me — though I wouldn’t be surprised if confirmation bias is playing a large role in my perceptions — that there is a lot of coverage and promotion of gold, both as direct advertising (buy from here) or in news stories (no more left! Prices insane!). Not quite over the top, but an (apparently) assertive push to pay attention to gold prices and buy from their sponsors.
Is it confirmation bias, and no one else notices it? I know there are lots of gold ads that are not on right wing-o-vision, could it just be a coincidence?
Is it feeding into their base, as in making political hay out of stressful financial times?
Could a handful of millionaire hosts have gotten together to invest in a few places, and actually have the on-air clout to inflate the price of gold (devious, but brilliant.)? Didn’t Ed Bass try an corner the silver market?
Or is gold just in the news a lot, no more than usual?
I see a lot of gold ads on the TV when I’m watching the daytime Judge shows. (To be more accurate, last year when I was recovering form my surgery and was given the good drugs so I couldn’r concentrate on anything more complex than daytime Judge shows.)
I do not watch or listen to any “Right-wing” shows, so I cannot tell if there is an excess of gold huckstering on them in comparison to any other low-rated program. (I also do not watch or listen to any “Left-wing” bloviating. Call me a know-nothing, but partisan arguments do not entertain or enlighten me.)
I may be showing my age, but the last cornering of the silver market I recall was by the Hunt Brothers.
Aren’t most or all of the back-to-the-gold-standard types right wing? That would explain why someone trying to get people to invest in gold would concentrate on right wing media; more people inclined to consider gold important.
According to much of the SDMB world view, Republicans and right of center people in general are rich people, and so it seems obvious to market to people with money. Same reason the WB network (or whoever they are now) and Univision have commercials for stupid people. Identify your potential customers.
Some portion of the right-wing overlaps with the view that the staggering deficit of the USA, which is increasing dramatically under Obama, is going to lead to inflation. In times of inflation it is good to own commodities, such as gold.
(There’s also a possible overlap with less educated people being more likely to listen/watch right-wing media and also to respond to a sell-your-gold pitch, or indeed right-wing media being targeted at the more gullible, but that’s getting pretty far out of GQ. )
With only a few notable exceptions (like Silver Thursday), gold and silver are “safe” investments. They don’t fluctuate like stock markets do, and in the long term they never decrease in value.
Thus the appeal to conservatives. The very word implies that you do not take chances with your finances. If you put it in gold or silver you have something of value that will not simply up and disappear, and if you buy it as an investment and sit on it you are likely to make money in the long term, albeit at a lower return than if you invest it in other things. Then again, those other things have cost people everything they have, so if you can afford it why not invest in a precious metal with a stable demand?
Advertising works in tiers. The more respected and successful your business the better ads you show. The tiers go like this:
Porn ads
Scammy ads about PC speed boosters, gold sales, mortages from non-banks
Big company ads, lots of branding, etc
A lot of these right-wing sites have such, lets say marginalized, content that tier 3 advertisers dont want to be associated with them. Tier 2 doesnt care as much. When I occasionally see content from right-wing sites, I am also surprised by the cheapness of their ads. Lots of local stuff, lots of western wear, lots of mortgage stuff, things that set off my scamdar, etc.
Is it a scam? Depends on your definition of scam. From what Ive read these gold companies really give a terrible price for the gold, but at that points youve already mailed it and its just easy to say yes instead of saying no, paying for postage back and selling it to someone else. Im not famliar with the buying of gold, but the big player is Goldline and there are no shortage of complaints:
The cynical part of me sees the right as more willing to sell out their audience to vendors like these. They already are playing them for the agenda of big business, so whats another scam on top of that? The less cynical part of me knows that its easy to make money off unsophisticated investors. They dont know how the experienced investors operate and pay a premium for things. You used to see this a lot with stocks and especially real estate. Now it seems the sharks are doing gold and silver.
In fact, gold fluctuates very much like the stock market does. See this graph.
That’s because gold is perceived as a hedge in bad times. When the market goes up, gold prices decline. In bad times, the market goes down but gold goes up. True, we are somewhat in an anomaly now with the market increasing along with gold, but the market has recovered much quicker than the economy and its likely gold won’t keep up if the market continues to climb.
It’s also not true that gold never decreases in value, as shown by this other graph. Gold has been down in real terms for 30 years. That’s not forever - everything goes up in the very long term because of inflation in the global economy - but it’s a generation and worse than the stock market over that time.
Gold prices are irrational because they can only be justified as an assumption that everything is getting worse with time. As I said above, in the long term that is never true.
Gold is a good investment when you think the economy is going to go south. Gold goes up when the dollar goes down. When the economy is booming, gold won’t keep pace.
So, if you paid attention over the past couple years. About 18 months ago there was a boom in gold buying. - People saw the recession coming and wanted to retain some of their wealth by changing their investments to gold.
Now, and starting a couple months back, the economy is in recovery, you will see a lot more of the gold selling advertising. People need to unload the gold so they can get their money back in stocks while they are still relatively low.
The main advantage to gold is that it has zero chance of going bankrupt. But as a good investment, its still about timing.
The worst marketing ploys involving gold are selling “Gold IRA’s” while some are legit, many are really selling shares in a company that holds gold, but not investing in gold directly. These are scams. The company can at any point sell any actual gold it had, pay bonuses to its board and go bankrupt leaving the investors with pennies on the dollar at best.
I don’t know. I don’t watch many TV commercials, nor am I privy to commodity marketing strategies. However, I do know that many “gold ads” are “cash for gold” which are urging the viewer to sell gold, which would seem to appeal to the opposite viewpoint.
Historically, gold always performs well during times of political and financial turbulence. The last runup was during the severe inflation and recession of the late Seventies and early Eighties. This is fact, independent of one’s political views.
Of course, the trick is to anticipate turbulent times before they occur–in today’s case, to have foreseen trouble and invested in gold in 2006. By the time everybody and his brother can see trouble, it’s too late–calm times return, and the price of gold falls.
It’s very, very unlikely. Any time the price of anything spikes (gold, oil, tulip bulbs) people tend to see evil conspricaies at work. In fact market booms and busts are perfectly natural and almost all of them are beyond the control of any individual or small group.
Yes, and he failed. It would take vastly more resources to attempt to corner the gold market.
It’s in the news because the price has risen, a lot. Whether you are left, right, or center, if you had the foresight to invest in gold three years ago, you are doing very well today. It’s unlikely you’ll do as well in the next three years, but that won’t stop people from trying.
It wasn’t Ed Bass but Nelson Bunker Hunt and Herbert Hunt who tried to corner the silver market. And they didn’t fail because of lack of resources per se but because the government changed the rules at the last minute to kill their scheme.
Not really. The militia/survivalist types work on the assumption that gold and silver won’t be much better. What counts is lead and brass in the appropriate calibers.
In terms of investment or a hedge against an unknown economic future, conservatives have always preferred tangible assets; things you can hold and see. Liberals prefer intangible assets like stocks more. It’s been that way as long as I can remember.
The advertising that’s attached to any medium (radio, TV, print) is probably more associated with the audience’s demographic than it is with their political beliefs.
The advertiser doesn’t care if you’re a liberal or conservative; he cares if you have a need and/or interest for his product, and the means to buy it.
You’ll rarely see ads for lipstick or handbags in a Car and Driver magazine, or hemorrhoid treatments or denture adhesive in Teen Vogue.
Likewise, the ads will usually match the education level, wealth, and sophistication of the audience as well.
I would bet that wrestling magazines probably don’t have many ads encouraging their readers to apply to Harvard.
Really, the ads will tell you a lot about the audience.
I don’t have a cite for this, but I’d imagine that wealthy, sophisticated people with lots of money don’t choose their investment vehicles based on radio advertisements. These ads are probably aimed at people who are not financially savvy, but still have some money they want to invest. (After all, there’s no point in trying to sell gold to people with no money whatsoever.)
Again, I’m trying my best to put this in a GQ context—it’s not an attack on the intelligence of right-wing talk-radio listeners. My statements above apply to any type of advertising you see, anywhere.
Nobody invested in gold three years ago, because gold is not an investment medium. It’s more accurate to say that the people who gambled on gold three years ago won their gamble.
Cite? I’m not aware of any studies correlating investment choices with political ideology. Most conservatives I know are pretty enthusiastic capitalists, so I’d be surprised if they were avoiding stocks.
Of course it is. According to Investments by Bodie, Kane, and Marcus (a leading finance textbook), “In addition to financial assets, individuals might invest directly in real assets. For example, real estate or commodities such as precious metals or agricultural products are real assets that might form part of an investment portfolio.”
I distinctly remember as far back as 1992-1995 that the Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy radio programs had a LOT of gold and silver* investment adverts on them, to the point where I brought it up to the small group of very right-wing co-workers which I knew. They unanimously boiled it down to three basic reasons they were actively buying gold and silver:
The UN was poised to take over the US and our currency would be nullified.
The race/ethnic wars were going to start and in the chaos the dollar would have no value.
A Democratic Congress would run up enormous deficits, over a trillion dollars per year, and as a result the dollar would be devalued.
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which of the three was the most likely to happen.
I also saw adverts on late-night TV at the time for platinum and palladium investing, and at least once even “strategic metals” (such as germanium and tantalum) investing.
There’s a couple of pirate radio stations around here that broadcast hard libertarian/“patriot”-oriented programming, and ads for gold investment firms make up maybe ever third or fourth commercial. The stations also seem to advertise a lot goods like canned crop seeds, natural remedies “the doctors don’t want you to know about”, and colloidal silver cures.
Gold, and Sleep Number Beds are the commercial mainstays of talk radio, right and left. I frequently listen to Stephanie Miller and Ed Shultz on Air America, and they both do those endorsement ads.
The most cogent criticism I’ve heard about investing in gold is that the supply of gold always increases, due to the peculiar nature of gold as an element: it doesn’t “combine”, there is not such thing as gold oxide, gold doesn’t rust. Whatever form gold takes, its still gold, you can melt it down at any time.
My father was a pawn broker, loaned money on gold, and if the pawn was not redeemed, he immediately sold the gold to gold brokers, he never held any. His reasoning being that if the value of gold went up, that meant the value of the dollars he got for it went down, making a gold investment little more than burying your money in the back yard.