Posts by Anthony Evans78

analogharbor44 said:Who on earth is actually buying this stuff?

Besides, this doesn't even belong in this thread.🙂

brightviper48 said:Most people in my circle aren't going to touch anything beyond real estate, a new car, or a standard savings account at a big bank like Chase. Of those who might actually venture into investing one day, a significant portion tends to lean toward gold appreciation.

An average of 5-10%.

Well, preserving wealth is, in itself, a return.

Assuming we're all still around to see it, we'll find out how the gold market plays out in the coming years—best of luck to you all 🙂

And most of them are going to get burned.

brightviper48 said:Silver is a better play than gold in any scenario—though even that feels overpriced right now.

Apple is overpriced too.

Because even the most clueless amateur knows gold is where the money is made these days. For prices to keep climbing, you need fresh buyers—and those people are running thin...

Gold will likely be higher ten years from now, sure, but the actual returns will probably be underwhelming. Forget about seeing gains of several dozen or even hundreds of percent at these levels.

A brilliant argument for why gold is priced where it is.
If you ask me, gold—and especially silver—is ridiculously cheap. Why? Just look back at my previous posts.
What kind of returns are we talking about? You buy gold to protect what you have, not necessarily to strike it rich, even if that happens once in a while.

brightviper48 said:Gold would have been a solid play at $1,000. At current levels, though—it’s just too expensive.

Here’s another one shouting into the void and still breathing.🙂
If you're such an expert, why don't you enlighten us and explain why it's so pricey?

That’s exactly why you buy gold during a crisis.
So many people sit around waiting for a dip or some specific price target that never comes, and they end up missing the boat entirely.
Just buy it and get some peace of mind. 🙂

I’m thinking the figure is closer to 62 tons.

Melissa Sanchez17 said:Does anyone actually have a clue how much gold the US would need to back up the dollar? Like, what’s even the total amount of USD currently floating around out there?

Your best bet is checking this here:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/annual-report-2010.pdf
Page 113.

Roughly translated: you're an idiot if you're just saving money; you have to take risks on the stock market.

QE never actually stopped; it just started going by different names... or maybe it didn't have a name at all 🙂

Alexander Lewis said:Does anyone actually know how much gold is out there?
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/thi...is-everywhere/

If you want to back all money—physical or electronic—with gold, the price of gold would have to skyrocket to an astronomical level.

And? 🙂
Maybe then they'd FINALLY stop all this insane money printing.🙂

That’s exactly why people buy coins 😉

Great. Now we get to trade paper gold here in America too.

Taylor Robinson51 said:Why would any specific amount in Dollars or Euros even matter? Look, one ounce of gold is an absolute standard that hasn't changed in thousands of years. A single Dollar, however, is a moving target; its value as a measurement shrinks every single year... In twenty years, people won't brag about saving 10,000 Dollars or Euros. They will talk about holding 250 grams of gold, just like how back in the day, nobody bragged about having millions in devalued currency, they bragged about having strong Deutsche Marks.

I suspect that in the future, the real metrics will be relationships like gold-to-oil or gold-to-wheat, rather than gold-to-Dollar or gold-to-Euro. For instance, nominally, I made a 20% profit in Euros on gold I bought a year ago, but my actual purchasing power gain is less than 5% if you look at it in terms of gas prices...

The point has been made.🙂

The Dollar has been looking pretty weak for the last 40 years, and honestly, it’ll probably be history in another 40. 🙂

First off, it all depends on how much gold the USA actually holds. That 8,000-ton figure is probably just a myth; the last real audit was back in the 50s. 🙂
Then there's the question of whether the dollar will be fully backed by gold, or just partially.
And third, what exactly are we backing? Physical cash in circulation? Every single dollar out there, both physical and digital? Bonds?
http://www.shadowstats.com/charts/mo...e-money-supply
Either way, the numbers are much higher than what they're telling us right now.

I tend to look at things through an empirical, common-sense lens.
The only thing I actually take Ben Bernanke at his word on is that he won't allow money to deflate—given current monetary policy, that’s practically impossible. They're essentially forced to keep printing just by the way money is created now.
Is there any number too big for them? 15 trillion? 30? 50? 100? I doubt it. At the start, QE was officially set at $700 billion, but it turns out they quietly funneled trillions to banks and corporations globally to bail them out, which really just delayed their inevitable collapse.
The Federal Reserve is making the same mistake as the ECB—thinking they can print their way out of problems when history has proven a thousand times over that you can't. No economic issue has ever been solved simply by printing paper.
I’m not saying precious metals are the only good store of value, but for most people here, they are. For me, the ultimate assets are land with drinkable water and actual knowledge.
The Federal Reserve has clung to one last step to maintain the illusion of safety in Treasury bills—buying them themselves using money conjured out of thin air. If I'm not mistaken, the Federal Reserve already accounts for more than half of all Treasury bill buyers. Mathematically, that illusion has to burst; it’s just a matter of which major player finally shouts, "The Emperor has no clothes!" You can't pretend everything is fine forever. And honestly, you can forget about a semi-normal life in the USA if oil producers suddenly decide to stop accepting the dollar. Dammit, we already have 50 million people on food stamps, unemployment is hovering around 20%, and our industrial base has been gutted and moved to China... how are we supposed to maintain any semblance of normalcy with such minimal systemic changes? I don't see it happening.
Thinking "it doesn't suit anyone, so it won't happen" is just burying your head in the sand.
Besides, precious metals don't even track the money supply. Newly mined gold and silver have only increased by 1-2% annually over the last decade, while paper inflation sits at 9-10%.
Take M1, M2, or M3 and calculate what the price of gold in dollars should be to actually track the money supply—you know, if the dollar were 100% backed by gold.

It’s about the methodology itself, not how long they've been using it.
How on earth can you exclude people who aren't actively looking for work from the unemployment numbers?!?!
neondriver5, that makes zero sense... the job boards are absolutely flooded...

What kind of capital flight from precious metals are you even talking about? You honestly think someone dumped their gold and silver and caused this crash? What universe are you living in? 🙂
It’s mind-boggling to me that precious metal prices are tanking while Bernanke claims interest rates will stay at zero through the end of 2014. Everything else he said is just pure nonsense.
The stock market rally, the frantic chasing... it's just sheep running from one side of the field to the other. This stopped making sense a long time ago. Stocks are only climbing because of the endless free money being pumped out by the Federal Reserve.
How can you call this a real market when Apple makes up 75% of the NASDAQ and is larger than the entire retail sector combined? They talk about a recovery, but nobody's actually seeing it—food stamp usage is at an all-time high, unemployment is sitting north of 22%, and the housing market is completely dead.

Umm...my point exactly...?
If we actually measured unemployment the way other countries do, it would be north of 22%.
Again, my point exactly.
But hey, feel free to keep trusting those official government numbers like they’re gospel...

It’s not like things can just keep going up when they’ve been crashing for this long.

I guess I should have said "they ought to rise" if you didn't catch my drift.
Let me rephrase: the President’s policies should be driving growth in an environment like this, yet prices keep tanking. It isn't some natural free-market correction; it's straight-up manipulation by big banks through paper shorts. We aren't looking at a "correction," we're looking at a rigged, twisted version of a "market." It used to be that corrections lasted weeks; now they happen in hours, which is why we see them happening all the damn time.