I’ve also heard ads by Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartman for gold. This is definitely a bipartisan effort. I think it makes more sense to advertise on right-wing radio but, regardless of rhetoric, people are fearful of a declining dollar and will be persuaded to buy at the peak.
He seems to be thinking about the immediate aftermath of a collapsed system, and saying that items of immediate intrinsic usefulness will have most value.
Well, no shit. Survivalists do stock up on nonperishable food, liquor, weapons, tools, supplies from cloth to motor oil.
Then what? Thousands of years of human history suggest that the most likely mediums of exchange (as opposed to commodities) to prove useful in a decentralized, low-technology environment (when immediate needs are met and commerce at some level begins) will be gold and silver. People can’t eat gold, but they can carry and store it more easily then rice, so if you’ve got as much rice stashed as you reasonably can, it makes sense to then have some gold as well (probably in easily-divisible stacks of coins).
That is, if a “crash back to the dark ages” is among your concerns, which was the circumstance I was addressing.
I don’t tend to watch political talk show shows on TV (I did, religiously, in my younger days, but largely lost interest in them ages ago) nor do I listen to any political talk shows on the radio. When I do listen to talk radio, it’s generally sports-oriented.
If you listen to Scott Van Pelt or Colin Cowherd or Mike & Mike on ESPN radio, what kind of advertising will you hear?
Typically, you’ll hear ads for…
- Gold
- Credit card/debt relief
- How to trade in a structured settlement for an immediate lump sum
- Strip clubs and topless bars
- Beer
- How to clean spyware off your PC
Seems to me, as a sports fan, I should feel insulted by THAT kid of advertising! But what does that tell us?
It tells us that AM radio audiences in general, whether political or not, conservative or not, are not held in high esteem by advertisers. I’m sure Scott Van Pelt would like to be running ads for Coca-Cola, Toyota or JC Penney, but classy advertisers just don’t think their type of customer is likely to be listening to AM radio. Whether you’re a fan of Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Joy Browne, Keith Olbermann or Jim Rome, most advertisers figure that, if you’re listening to AM radio during the workday, you’re a loser, and not worth advertising to.
Spot on
It’s a great electrical conductor too. And you can do neat tricks with gold these days in catalysis using organometallic chemistry. I don’t know of any lead-catalyzed reactions.
I think the asset allocation fund my IRA is in holds a small amount of gold and other metals and commodities. I know it’s about 3% gold right now, but I don’t remember what the breakdown was when I opened it several years ago.
Maybe this is more of a GQ question, but Mr Smashy’s post made me curious. If I were to buy some gold through an ETF and stuck the ETF in my Roth IRA, would the withdrawal be tax-exempt at age 59.5?
I’ve made a fair amount of money betting on gold over the past few years.
Let me jump out on a limb here and say I think it will continue to rise if you have a long-term outlook.
I’m not sure if it’s a right-wing thing exclusively, but from a psychological standpoint gold is a standard. Only about 85M ounces a year are mined (if I remember correctly) and that really isn’t enough to meet demand.
Those of you who have commented that you can’t eat gold don’t understand it. Absolutely you can, and in nearly every society for thousands of years, in the worst times, it’s gold that is the standard for buying food. I’m uninterested in why this is, but I am interested in making money off that fact.
We as a nation are bankrupt. We as a nation have proved that we will borrow from our children to keep ourselves in plenty. We as a nation have decided we should tax only the rich, and we grow increasingly loathe to extend our federal tax to the broad population.
We are going to have to pay for all this. Feel free to mock the right wingers, but privately bet on gold for the longer term horizon. I see no politically successful exit strategy out of our current mess other than inflation.
Here’s the gold chart for the last 35 years: http://66.38.218.33/scripts/hist_charts/yearly_graphs.plx
How long a term?
Gold was 600 bucks in 1981. That means it was worth more than 1400 in today’s dollars. If you bought then at the peak, and held that gold until now, you still wouldn’t have made your money back. That’s about a 200 dollar (2010 USD) loss over nearly 30 years of investment. At around twenty year mark or so, you’d have been looking at a 75% loss, but as your chart shows, gold has rallied some in the last ten years.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’ll keep going up. Or, then again, the bottom might drop out of the market as happened after 1981. That’s the thing about commodities markets. They’re unpredictable, especially for a commodity like gold whose value is even more tied to ignorant magical fairy tale beliefs than other assets.
Except for those twenty years where it lost three quarters of its value. It met demand pretty well then.
This is a solid investment strategy only if you believe society will collapse. Otherwise, you’re still subject to the historically high variance in gold demand. You can make a killing, yes, but you need to time it right.
For those who care about the facts, and not the nonsense you just made up:
We as a nation are still fairly short of our highest debt-to-GDP ratio. We will indeed have a debt problem if we continue on the current course, but for now we’re nowhere near bankrupt. And we don’t just tax the rich, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our taxation is actually fairly flat, in fact. Its only bit of progressivity comes from transfer payments. And payroll taxes are, in case you weren’t aware, federal taxes.
We’re currently experiencing some rather strong disinflation, which could lead directly to deflation if we don’t fight vigorously against it.
It takes a special sort of person to worry about fever when the patient is, right now and right here in front of us, on the verge of hypothermia. A touch of inflation is just what the doctor ordered. The possibility, of course, remains of a massive currency devaluation a couple decades out if we don’t get the debt situation in control by then. That’s not a problem of the present. The problem of the present is warming things back up. The problem with the Fed is not that it’s done too much, but that it hasn’t yet done enough.
I don’t care why the masses like gold. I just need to retire comfortably.
It’s rather silly to take the 1980 gold spike peak and pretend that abberrant point is a reasonable place to take as a random starting point. It’s equally silly to pretend there are no fundamental changes in how governments are financed. It’s silly to pretend debt tolerance and loan-repayment commitment psychologies have not changed in the last 30 years. But hey; it’s your portfolio, so build it as you see fit.
The lovely thing about arguments over gold is that you can actually put your money where your mouth is (I don’t suppose any seasoned investor needs to be told no basket of investments should contain only gold eggs). Feel free to invest in the dollar and short gold. Feel free to ridicule, or be snide, or pretend that I’m giving investment advice or whatever other tack you want to take.
I’m uninterested in your current opinion, but perhaps a review of where we are in 2035 or so will make for an interesting comeuppance for one of us or the other. 