Posted on 10/22/2014 7:23:19 AM PDT by blam
Akin Oyedele
October 22, 2014
"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."
That's what Warren Buffett said back in 1998.
Gold has long been considered a safe-haven investment. However, the price of gold has performed dismally in recent years.
For those who don't trust the conventional financial markets, there are alternative more unorthodox ways to put away wealth.
We put together a list of some odd assets that have performed relatively well.
But be warned. These assets are very illiquid and there's no guarantee that their values won't plunge like gold before it.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
It really ticks me off when I hear the ads that some companies put out trying to sell gold. They claim that gold is a means to store value that will never go bad, unlike stocks and currencies, etc. The real truth is that gold has value for precisely the same reason that currencies do, namely that people are willing to accept gold in exchange for other assets. Gold has no more actual intrinsic value than any financial asset. Now, as this article points out, there are other assets that are stores of value. If your concern really is storing value in the event of a true economic collapse, only one of these alternatives really makes any sense. In a true societal collapse, only guns and ammo would have true intrinsic value, namely that they give you the ability to defend yourself and your property. It the SHTF scenario, none of the other possibilities, including gold, would really be worth anything.
“It (gold) has no utility”
I’m switchings many of my electrical connections to the gold plated ones which are now available in auto stores.
Wine, firearms seem to be the only practical items among the 11 listed.
During the obola apocalypse I can think of other items, but firearms (guns and ammo) will be high on that list.
Bookmark for later
This is largely because every single ounce held in the LMBA system has been sold to (on average) a hundred different people.
That's a fake supply of 100 to 1. A hundred promissory notes for every physical ounce.
Gold is insanely undervalued. Not indeed by a 100 to 1, but by some large factor.
I store most of mine in real estate and Apple stock. So far so good.
I keep mine in my wallet - it fits.
See what this guy says.
Sorry Blam: I can’t watch videos at my current site so can’t make a sensible comment. I’ll catch it later.
The other benefit of selling a collectible, be it a stamp, rare coin, art work, etc. is that there is no 10-99 generated. If you buy and sell a stock, bond or mutual fund you will pay capital gains tax on it.
Are cartridges considered “odd”?
Gold is never worth nothing. Neither is junk silver. You should have some of both. In addition food, ammo and booze are always worth something.
“It has no utility.” Warren is a smart fellow, but in trying to make a point he made this ridiculous statement.
“Gold is insanely undervalued.”
This is quite incorrect by realistic measures. If you are only considering golds value from a paper or psychological value then golds price is exactly what it is. If you are considering the price from an actual usable commodity value, it is insanely overpriced.
Lets compare it to something highly needed in manufacturing, but much more rare, lithium. Lithium, however, is not characteristically price manipulated or with the same ownership stigma.
world gold reserves 114 billion tonnes estimated
world lithium reserves 13.4 million tons estimated (USGS)
pure refined lithium cost $123/lb, or if it were measured in troy ounces that would be about $10 per ounce.
So if lithium which is considerably more rare, and in high demand for batteries for electric vehicles and other things is $10 per ounce, then shouldn’t gold which is considerably more available be worth less than half that?
So in reality the price of gold over the cost of mining is just a big mental case.
I am heavily invested in metals, copper,nickel,silver,zinc etc.
It`s all in that big glass jug by the fireplace.
The value of Gold comes from its role as money, not from its industrial uses.
Gold has an enormous stockpile to supply ratio. It has been stored - over 2000 years! - precisely because it is money, not an industrial metal.
If Gold was only an industrial metal then its supply profile would be that of an industrial metal. Users would keep just what they needed at hand to minimize warehousing costs.
But Gold’s value comes from its status as money. It has value because it possesses all of the properties of money. And money is stored. It retains value, so it is stored. Whereas nobody’s going to stockpile Lithium for 2000 years.
Not many things are truly money. Many people have difficulty realizing this, as the fiat currency in their pocket has *most* of the properties of money. It’s good enough - for now.
But fiat currency is not a store of value. In that sense it is not money. For instance: the dollar in your pocket is currently depreciating at about 7% a year.
This is because its only value comes from Government guarantee. The Government is hopelessly bankrupt and must create trillions more fiat dollars to meet its debts. It is doing this in a more or less controlled way: in the meantime the dollar is hemorrhaging buying power.
Gold is *also* depreciating in the short term. This is because of the vast supply of fake, not-real, paper promises of Gold that has been created solely to suppress the price of Gold.
Gold is suppressed because the Government needs time to devalue the dollar without causing too much friction - and if Gold were allowed to rise in line with the currency supply then they’d have no time at all. Everyone would ditch the dollar and jump into Gold.
But eventually Government intervention fails and the market has its say. The price of Gold will rise to a price where it accounts for the currency supply. This is well north of 5000 dollars per ounce in today’s currency.
Hope this proves helpful.
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