Johan van der Smut

I'm with Bobsta and dopamine. I feel like a gambler who's suddenly on a losing streak and all but ready to cut his losses so he can sit on the sidelines for a while - more fool me for believing what arguably was hype. My less charitable side entertains the notion that ramping has been replaced by backpedalling in the past couple of weeks. Although I'm relatively sanguine about losing money, I don't know if I'm coming or going as far as inflation/deflation goes, and neither, it seems, do the experts. It all reminds me of William Goldman's axiom in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, re: predicting which feature films are going to be successful. "Nobody knows anything." (But some people, I'll grant you, have better track records than others.)

Although gold's now taking a bit of a dive too.

It was down to $12.24 just now, but has recovered five cents.

Well, silver has just fallen below $12.50, which I think was a previous low.

Anyone know why silver's just fallen off a cliff? Down to $12.37 according to Kitco.

The silver ETF PHAG remains a BUY-IF, I see.

FP has made good calls all along. I only wish I'd listened to him more closely. On HPC today he's predicating it might fall to $730 but will be $1,200-1,500 by spring 2010. Which is helping me not to panic too much, I guess.

Blimey (he said, still not able to sleep and wondering how he's going to get any work done tomorrow). Silver's gone from about $12.50 to $13 in a matter of minutes. Now that's what I call volatile.

The Bullion Desk is showing silver at $12.49 and gold at $790. I don't think I'll be sleeping much tonight.

Ah, now, you were doing well until you mentioned cgnao. I don't want to get into the debate about whether he's a visionary or a nutter, because frankly I don't know. He's clearly a clued-up guy. But can someone answer me this: why aren't more of the City and Wall Street's finest preparing for the end of civilisation as we know it? Isn't it just possible that he's a pathological catastrophist with an advanced knowledge of finance? I'm not trying to be rude - I'm just throwing peanuts because I've found many of the discussions here to be rather incestuous of late. And tonight, with my money on the line, I'm asking the kind of questions that have been bugging me for some time. EDIT: As for John Stepek - well, I enjoy his Money Mornings very much, but the question remains: why would any financial whizz worth his salt go into a badly paid profession like journalism when there are much bigger rewards elsewhere?

Sorry, I wasn't presuming to speak for your bowels; only my own.

It's called "crapping yourself because your investments appear to be tanking" and "challenging what was arguably becoming an increasingly complacent discussion (except when Magpie or wrongmove stuck their oar in) in the hope of gaining reassurance and enlightenment". PS I like the moniker "Smuttie" though.

Glad to hear it. (It's not my real name, btw. It was Goldmember's name in the Austin Powers film.)

Hi bigbigt As you'll have gathered, I'm a layman in these matters. I mean, I'm a sharp guy, but if the world's top economic minds can't decide what's going to happen, what hope do the rest of us have? So yes, I guess you could say I'm looking for something solid to grasp onto. Thanks for your advice.

The problem that some of us have is that it's difficult to judge whether your position is self assured or fundamentalist.

Nadler at least adds a crumb of comfort at the end:

I'm in a similar predicament. A lot of the debate here goes over my head, so I guess I've been putting my faith in those people whose broad views about debt, house prices etc have so far proven to be correct: Peter Schiff, the staff at Moneyweek et al. I work, I'm frugal, I save and I've been locked out of the property market. (Actually that's not quite true. I could have probably bought somewhere poky and horrible a couple of years ago, but the groupthink of "property prices always go up" struck me as terribly mistaken.) I also wanted to turbo-charge my deposit and , when gold was nearing £1,030 and silver approaching £21, I was tempted to sell and make a profit of about 20%. Now I guess I'm looking at a 10% paper loss (several thousand pounds) and wondering how much further prices will fall. I'm actually fairly sanguine about this. If I do lose a few thousand, plus the interest I'd have gained from putting the money in a savings account, I'll put it down to experience. But if my paper losses mount, I don't know how long my resolve will hold. Moreover, if enough investors feel similarly and decide to cut their losses this week, I dread to think what the effect will be. Then there are the siren voices of people like this: Bill Cara Whenever I hear that financial armageddon is just around the corner, or that some lines on a graph show PM prices about to explode, or [as I did on Jim Sinclair's site and on HPC] that particle experiments at CERN next month might cause the end of the world, my conviction wavers. Although the point about smacking down the gold price at 4.30pm was a good one, I'll admit.

Well, at least there's been a small uptick for the day, from $819 to $825.

$848 and heading vertically downwards. Bollocks

David Cameron has just been mocking Brown's "financial genius" at PMQs. "This is the man who sold gold at the bottom of the market." So, will gold become a mainstream topic, I wonder?