aliveandkicking

I seem to be in two minds about all of this stuff

The only way a gold standard will be reintroduced is if total failure occurs and people arise to power who think a gold standard can avert world war 2. And i do mean world war 2.

It would be easier to imagine if gold had a bar code on the side and some kind of authenticity certificate that could be read by one of those note counting machines. I suppose if you stuck the gold inside the certficate somehow it could be more imaginable.

Supposedly i have been suspended for 14 days..........

Again a stupid post from somebody who refuses to allow a person to discuss a point of view like for example Prechters or Jim rogers one. And apparently some other people here are so immature that they are unable to be present with adults without self distructing in embarrassment

Utter bollocks. No facts?? Barrick mined gold for a cash price of well under 500 us an ounze in 2007 or was it 2008? Jim rogers says that gold is difficult because the price often is far away from the fundamentals But hey! facts are irrelevant All you want is to believe.

When you surface to buy things people will know you have gold. So you might have to buy a helicopter to prevent them following you back from the shops. A helicopter will require a heap of spares and fuel that does not lose its octane rating with time as the more volatile components degrade as the fuel goes stale. Regular petrol goes stale after about one year when kept in a sealed container which means it becomes difficult to start your motor bike or chain saw at that time. Come on guys! You need to get out of the comic books and computer games and enter the real world!

Funny that you imagine you are anonymous when you are blabbering about your gold on the internet and anybody with the necessary authorities can hunt you down and know quite a bit about you Probably even some teenage masturbator already knows where you live and where the gold is

So when it all turns to custurd you will consult your internet lcd screen to get the price of gold?? and all the items you want to buy will have marked prices???? You wont have to barter with your gold for food? Or maybe Schaublin thinks the State will arrive to declare that gold is fiat and all prices must be set relative to gold? the funny thing is that you guys think i am the idiot the fact is food for a killer or a shotgun cartridge gets all of your gold unless you have some kind of protection organised

You are mixing me with the tooth doctor. You must know that tobacco was the currency of some of the US states a while back and you must know that cigarettes are currency in prisons. Currency is the means of exchange. Gold is not used much as the means of exchange although it could be. If social disorder is widespread shot gun cartridges will be in demand because people will be using them up and people will know that a shot gun cartridge can be easily used to buy something. Similarly when you are hungry and know others are hungry a tin of food can be used to buy things. Scrap iron might not be so easily tradeable i agree unless you run out of material for knives and iron becomes scare - which is quite possible if society as we know it ends. When the egyptians were building some of their pyramids and the Hitites had discovered how to make iron their iron was more valueable than gold. Can you or any of your friends make iron? Imporantly unless you make a hardened iron you cannot have a useful weapon so if you can get steel it will be more easily used as currency. Unless something is useful it cannot be used as a currency. More or less anything can be used for a currency.

I dont see why it has to be QE to infinity when only the required amount of QE will be sufficient, and buying your own shares when the price falls can be a pretty sound practice as you can either buy the company back or sell the shares profitably. Ultimately we dont know if it will be an inflationary recession or something else. I am assuming it will be inflationary with glitches along the way. I dont buy gold as being currency. It is no more currency than platinum, scrap iron, cigarettes, diamonds, tinned food or shot gun cartridges. If somebody says you MUST believe i just think what i think about that. As for gold double accounting it must be possible but i have no idea if that kind of thing is true or just mythology. It seems also that you MUST believe this to be amongst the faithful.

Jake Well it makes no sense to hold cash produced by the same people who produce the treasury bills which earn interest and reject the treasury bills. The central banks used to enable interbank settlement with huge denomination banknotes. For the banks these notes are probably still as good as cash. And if the government want to they can issue one billion legal tender notes tomorrow. Is he really favouring cash over treasuries?? One of the reason treasuries are sought after is because they are effectively interest paying cash that can be used as cash by the banks with the federal reserve. Edit: http://stephenlaughlin.posterous.com/barro...robert-prechter Q and A by Barrons with Prechter Q: You've been quoted as suggesting people invest in Treasuries, considering them "safe cash proxies," but you've also said skeptical things about Treasuries given massive borrowing and the threat of deflation. Which is it? A: It's a matter of short rates versus long. The best investment stance for conservative investors has been simple: safety. My primary recommendation is safe-cash equivalents. This means Treasury bills*, Swiss money-market claims, some New Zealand bonds, some gold and some cash. There has been no change there. Cash has been good. Today you can buy twice the house, twice the stock shares and twice the gasoline that you could a short while ago. * Treasury bills mature in under one year to pay cash. Warpig I am more interested in discussing what is likely to happen than attacking some side just for the sake of it. If Prechter turns out to be right people who bought gold with mortgage debt will be poorer or ruined. I am assuing he will not be right, but it is still interesting to try and understand why he has created the beliefs he has. One thing is for sure as time goes on the man gets a bit more credibility from people like me who only thought inflation was coming. Meanwhile it appears true that gold can be mined at a fraction of the current price and there is many years of supply already above ground as i understand it. Gold will probably carry on rising in price for maybe some years yet before those simple economics alter the price much. And those economics dont go away because some guy on the internet thinks i am a troll or whatever gets thrown at me by people who appear to have some vested interest in ramping gold

Just as likely the flat earthers become such a minority they are regarded as irrelevant and no new theory is thought to be needed.

My point was mainly that we can still understand a point of view even if we dont agree with it. Prechters argument seems to be that cash or ability to pay or liquidity is being provided to the banks as if liquidity was the problem. But many people like Roubini or Stilitz say liquidity is not the fundamental problem but rather insolvency is the problem. Therefore because insolvency might be the problem it tends to make Prechters views possible unless the banks are nationalised. The other angle here is that Prechters deflation can be delayed with massive coordinated efforts for years but that does not mean the forcast of deflation was wrong.

Jake That was an interesting post you did on prices in the Japanese deflation so you know about deflation and what it can do. So it is then curious that you are describing Prechter views inaccurately. What does 'print fiesta mean' in the context of Prechters view that the banks will hoover up the cash and hold it because they are frightened they will need this cash to support their deposits? Also Gold cannot have much meaning as the ultimate currency when the banks are now desparately wanting to gain cash in the prechtarian view, during which time gold will fall in price towards his 650 target. Prechters view is fairly clear that you should be in interest paying cash equivalents now like US treasuries until deflation has ended and at that point move to gold and presumably other assets like property shares and commodities etc.

You are more or less strengthening the point that Jim Rogers was making and i highlighted that you seem not to understand In a tulip mania there is little underlying demand to plant tulips. Instead people think they are smart for holding tulips. But this smartness relies on finding another smart investor who will buy the tulips who is not interested in planting tulips. Therefore it is only smart while the trend is with you. Fundamentally however gold is already over priced relative to its mining cost and already there is a massive amount of gold above ground that cannot be used maybe for decades? simply because the underlying fundamental demand for gold is much lower than what is available already mined. Some students of gold of course like to make out gold is valueable because it is not useful. Which is rediculous because obviously gold is useful. Importantly however the students will tell you gold does not behave like a commodity and cannot be like a tulip.

I often read Everbanks daily pfennig - usually by Chuck Butler but he is now in Florida and one of the VP's is doing the 'letter' http://www.dailypfennig.com/ Gold is was up for a second day, as the dollar slide helped spur demand for precious metals. Gold has had a very close negative correlation to the dollar, moving higher as the US currency drops, and falling as the currency rises. So the drop in the US$ vs. the euro propelled the metals higher. The price of gold was also helped by a report which showed production in South Africa fell 18% in January from a year earlier. As with all commodities, a drop in production causes an increase in price. So they seem to be talking gold up, or observing it going up. Either way they dont seem to want their customers to have gold accounts surely??

Apparently it is vitally important on this board not to libel anybody. It was morgan Stanley. I think though they issued Certificates and charged for storage when they had no silver rather than ran an ETF.

It seems the reason you cant understand me is something to do with your bias, and habit of being pedantic over things which are irrelevant Even Jim rogers will tell you that gold is prone to bubbles because there is low fundamental demand for gold as something useful compared to the all ready mined supply of gold. But you want to come up with 'the world is not awash with surplus gold; it is being quietly accumulated in physical form whilst vast amounts of paper gold are played with on margin.' as if you have some great knowledge that nobody else has. I note from wiki that Barrick mined 7,700,000 oz gold in 2008 at a cash cost of 443 US dollars an ounze, and i wonder why people know that India bought 200 tonnes of gold at about 1045? Oh the IMF told you about it. It must be true i suppose. And i see the Chinese say they prefer US debt But hey you are the expert researcher

How many people in the world owning gold are debt free? And before you start whining 'it is different', it amounts to the same thing because if you have debts you will find it hard to buy a house with debt. You can though suck out any equity to buy gold. When all the people levered up with debt who own gold get rid of their debt i bet the price will be lower than otherwise is the case. As far as i know Barrett gold is american owned and is the largest gold miner in the world. Are you disputing that gold is mined every day? Or are you just unclear??

Nearly all of the money in the economy that assets are priced in, is debt based. If a banks gives you a mortgage the seller has piles of dosh to drive up the price of gold, wages, copper, bricks, plastics land and everything else a house is made of. You already know gold was around 35 dollars an ounze when there was less debt based money in the world. And you seem fond of telling me i am an ignorant and need to do more research But apparently when reason is applied to your erroneous belief system that makes me some kind of fraud! Worse you like to correct my spelling!

I would guess the banks who are FDIC insured like Everbank are under pressure from the government to lower their customers exposure to gold so that this gold is sold or held personally. At current prices gold is over valued relative to its mining costs. The feds can then oblige people speculating in a none productive asset to move to something more productive so that the economy can get going again - because these people will know it will not be so easy to sell their gold if the price crashes and their held gold does not make much difference because there is a huge surplus of gold in the world. The price is only set at the margin by the smaller amount that is bought and sold and more and more is mined everyday and often controlled by the anglo american interests. Obviously the fewer gold players who can easily buy and sell using electronic methods then the easier it will be to overwhelm buyers and encourage them to take losses to get the price back to the production cost. The price of gold is no different to a house. When it does not reflect the production cost it is not fairly valued.

I will hope you are right since i just bought a house a month ago and already i am wondering what i have done with such terrible deflationary recessionary news all around. Stuff will not be worth much without demand. Last week you were wondering what was going on. It seems evident that stuff is not needed because the recovery is not truelly there outside a bit of inventory adjustment. Silver is just stuff

In case it escaped your attention, Iraq is now part of america and countries like finland italy france and new zealand have soldiers in afghanistan and japans tankers are supplying the forces at sea All this nonesense about the demise of the west is more or less psy ops for the benefit of the sheeple