13 thoughts on “Gold and silver

  1. And remember, the whole point of gold is that an ounce of gold is always an ounce of gold. What’s really at work here is that your dollars are worth that much less…

  2. @anon, Yes. Of course. And you can’t eat dollars or gold. Which is why I also have a more than a little bit of food stored away. Anyone want to trade an ounce of silver for a 50 pound bag of lentils?

  3. i guess i wasn’t buying at the top after all. $14.00 silver seemed pricey at the time.

  4. I recently saw a gold Double Eagle (worth 20 dollars) go for around $35K current “dollars”.

    If an ounce of gold is worth 20 real dollars and that ounce now costs 1670.00, then our current “dollar” has lost almost 99% of its value.

    You’d better get your houses in order.

  5. I sold a few pounds of scrap silver when it was around $13 an ounce. I thought that was high too.

    Right now, the ratio says it’s time to swap silver for gold. Is anyone doing that?

  6. Lyle is correct. Today’s US Dollar is worth about a penny 100 years ago.

    How much HOPE! can I get for an ounce of gold these days?

  7. With all due respects, Lyle, I believe your comment is true but misleading. The dollar has lost 99% of its value in the sense that a dollar buys roughly one one-hundredth what it did then. That does not mean, however, that people are 1% as wealthy as they were then; nor that the dollar is one one-hundredth as significant economically and politically as it was then. The dollar is 1% of the value, but people’s income is thousands of times higher in dollar amounts.

    What is significant is the rate of the dollar’s decline, as well as the fact that it’s happening during the Second Great Depression. A sharply rising price of gold tends to signal inflation to come, and when inflation outpaces nominal income gain, you get lower real incomes and declining national wealth.

    Nevertheless, there’s no real reason you couldn’t have a perfectly good economy with $1670 per ounce gold, or $1.67 million per ounce gold–as long as it would stay there.

    And no, I don’t believe in the gold standard. Before you condemn me as a Communist, let me say in my defense that my non-belief in it came from the decidedly non-Communist Friedrich Hayek. Basically, he considered the gold standard a formerly useful superstition, which had lost its usefulness when people stopped believing in it after it was dropped. He pointed out that any nation that adopted it would drop it as soon as it became inconvenient, which would make it useless at its sole purpose: keeping prices steady.

  8. I wonder when the government is going to seize all privately owned gold like they did during the great depression? Without reimbursment of course.

    You can’t use gold to defend your home from the starving masses trying to raid you to get your food and water. And from the looks of things were going to be there pretty soon.

  9. @Shawn, I doubt they would try it without compensation. They might try to buy it at some discount but I doubt they would get more than about 1/3 of the gold out there.

  10. Besides governments, who the hell is still buying metals? For at least 18 months now (more like 24), if you didn’t have yours it was too late to start. Since that time it has been “buying time” for the 3-B’s, as mentioned above.

  11. I don’t follow the metals market very closely but I noticed today that platinum is cheap right now (compared to gold and silver). Platinum used to run approx 2X gold. Rhodium is also cheap now.

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