nicejim

It's a chart of the goldminers index priced in gold. It could portend a slump in gold whilst equities stay where they are.

GoldMoney are doing a customer/visitor survey at the moment, if you visit the homepage. There's a section to let them know what could be improved. As soon as I finished the survey I remembered that paying storage fees with metal, on which commission has already been paid, is something I've thought for a while they should improve - to be more like BV. Needless to say, I didn't mention it. So, if anyone feels the same way and is yet to take the survey... BV silver: I got an email a week ago to say my account was enabled for silver. So if anyone doesn't have it yet, they might simply be phasing it in. You pay for Gross weight, not Net, so beware when comparing prices.

That one is for a temporary loss of income, perhaps for situations such as when BA staff had to work for free for a month. And it's a deferral of interest scheme rather than government payment. There is another one for unemployed people, where the interest is paid on loans up to £175k for up to 2 years. So, no need to get a job if you've got an I/O mortgage! Repayment mortgagees pay for this and can't benefit. They need to buy private insurance for themselves as well as buying insurance for the I/O guys. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/moneybox/7601147.stm Renters can claim housing benefit but I'm not sure how much effort the government goes to to keep them in their home for any length of time.

Strong words from Tom Stevenson (a market and investment commentator at Fidelity International) in the Telegraph: But platinum could be better. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment...to-economy.html

If you look closely, he's shouting "Suckerrrrrrr!" whilst running to the nearest gold dealer with £600k in notes

I think Cgnao has a smillie for that. If their income has improved they might get away with it. ... It's more to do with affordability than income multiples. I suppose this makes sense, because if someone can afford £500 rent they can afford £500 mortgage, nomatter what their income is. This will have to be stress tested for higher interest rates though. http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pages/Library/Commun.../2009/140.shtml

Apparently there were 9,100,000 in 1979. Does that show the lack of public awareness these days? http://www.cruzis-coins.com/sovs/Sovmintage.html

Ed Steer also noticed that one. He received this in an email at the end of 2007: "Did you realize that EVERY new multi-decade high gold has reached, from $425 or so in 2003 to $735 in 2006 to $843 in November to $843 last night, has occurred at 3 am EST on a Sunday night? EVERY SINGLE TIME! And EVERY SINGLE TIME gold has been IMMEDIATELY clocked to make sure that any excitement/sentiment/follow through that might occur is IMMEDIATELY squashed." http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayGsd.php "Gold sentiment seems to diverging: America versus the rest." Russia added 400,000 ounces in September. "At this point in the year, over 1.02 million ounces of gold and 22.09 million ounces of silver have been converted into eagles." "the ECB Central Bank squadron appears to be out of the gold market. Last week saw a 'sale' of only 0.09 tonnes"

Tax affairs and home-storage of valuables are things best kept secret I use a 1/10oz Krug for educational purposes, all the rest is in Zurich...ish. Congrats on the sale.

The indexes are more sophisticated than that, but I expect a small number of sales would make them less accurate in any case. As I understand it, they calculate the price of various characteristics of houses sold (number of bedrooms, size of garden, etc) and project those prices onto an average house (3.6 bedrooms, 0.21 acres, etc). When there are fewer buyers and less panic to get on the ladder, the houses which sell might be those which score highly in characteristics which are not counted by the statisticians (stylish wallpaper, recently installed boiler, etc). If the index includes the value of these characteristics in the price of those which it measures then it will overestimate the average price by overstating the attractiveness of the average house.

New mortgage lending regulations The VIs in the Times tried to make it a Nanny State issue because we're going to have to tell the banks how much we spend on alcohol*. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/busi...icle6880612.ece I consider it a good thing if I don't have to outbid a booze-addled nomark who can't really afford a mortgage. It's no consolation to me that he'd lose the house in 3 or 4 years, leaving me to pick it up cheap at auction - I'll have paid loads in rent by then, and it will have burn marks in the carpets and smell of dog Supply shortage leading to record prices Someone on the HPC newsfeed pointed out that this is Righmove prices, so it's dreamworld seller prices rather than feet-on-the-ground buyer prices. Also, the supply squeeze is not quite as reported. They checked a few London postcodes and didn't find a shortage. Fulham is mentioned in the article so I checked the SW6 postcode: Rightmove has 574 for sale (not including under offer) and houseprices.co.uk has 580 sold since the start of last August. Their latest sales data is for August 2009, so it's about 1 year's worth of property on the books of those who use Rightmove. * Nanny State and alcohol. Couldn't resist this OT article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/north_east/8278312.stm

Fergus Wilson on the Renegade Economist channel. I don't think they got on. He should have brought a puppy. From:

If you're comparing it to paper then yes, it's done far better. Productivity has increased but only against 3rd world armies, and the price of the increase may be quite significant. When I calculated the gold relative to soldiers' wages I thought the factoid added more weight to the charts of gold falling in value over time than to the claim that it holds value. I doubt anyone here is hoping to hold gold for 500+ years though Anyway, it's been holding value today - $1064ish a new record? Edit: $1065.2 but it's doing the g/s ratio no favours!

In what respect has it held its value if it formerly employed a soldier for a month and now does so for a week or less? Edit: the first sovs had about 2x the gold of current sovs, but the gold value has still come down in terms of soldiers' pay.

It's hard to keep the faith http://boards.fool.co.uk/Message.asp?mid=1...&sort=whole

You think it will take that long? The spin is in the headline, the news is in the article. Number of mortgages up 29% in August http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/busi...icle6870711.ece Note that it "dipped". It didn't fall or drop, it "dipped".

Apologies for posting this link without reading it first (tired eyes and brain), but it's relevant to that comment: Adam Hamilton: Commitment of traders reports don't fully tell the tale http://gata.org/node/7891

Me too. We won't necessarily have gold in national currencies and we almost certainly won't have all the debt paid off before economies start to grow again, but whilst currencies and share prices fall in value to better represent the size of the economy they represent, gold is the place for the lazy investor to be (TA experts may take other routes). I'm not a bug, I consider myself a gold "opportunist".

2 stand-out dates are 1775 and 1785. The first could be because of the American Revolution and I wonder if this is significant... July 6 1785 – The dollar is unanimously chosen as the money unit for the United States (the first time a nation has adopted a decimal coinage system). Why is the trend downwards? I thought deflation (in prices!) would be the norm in gold if anything.

That reminded me of Max Keiser's definition of bank reserves. It goes something like this: "Banks don't have any reserves these days, they now have mathematical formulae which demonstrate the existence of reserves under certain circumstances" Seen this thread? "How attached are you to the ideas you hold?" http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index....c=7019&st=0 Without the fascination with medium term price movements this thread would have nothing but pictures of rockets and skydivers

There was plenty to be had there for someone who got it right and sat tight

Brazilian Real doing well too. Check the 1 year chart. http://www.kitco.com/gold_currency/charts.htm?USD

From Reuters: As dollar fades, gold's currency shine brightens http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5963BX20091007 And next year...

To be fair, it's just reporting data (though their method of calculation may be up for debate). If gold went down in USD but up in buying pressure it would be saying "Gold still considered a good bet by the market". I notice USD went below 76 for a while. If you want exposure to a basket of them, try AUCO (ETFX GOLDMININ ETFX RUSSELL GLOBAL GOLD FUND) from ETFS Securities. True. The whole site's been a bit weird lately. I don't know if it's because of the Mayan Calendar, a full moon, a bradley turn date, cosmic rays, alien mind control, sunshine, moonlight, good times or the boogie but it's too early to blame it on the format of the gold thread. My post count overtook the gold price yesterday. Now gold has fought back.

Good points. The theories about the Mayan calendar and events repeating in a shorter timespan make sense in this hectic world, but the internet didn't speed up the arrival of the phase so it might not lessen its duration.