Joan and Iso, a bit of Sunday morning musings about gold, oil, and such trivial things in the minds of those who
are now thankfully banned from this thread:
I posted elsewhere my fundamental discomfort with S. Africa and investing there. I have been to
Tanzania once and only for a month, and that ancient history by investment standards in 1989. During that
time I came to realize and have since had confirmed many times that folks who rely on US news sources
are, by the very nature of how the US views Africa in general, at the very core of the subject, information deprived.
Most of Africa and of particular import to folks like Joan who has all her gold investments there is unstable
and is likely to remain so for a time far enough in the future for investors to be eternity. I have two friends
and have had several patients who are immigrants from either S. Africa or Zimbabwe. They would all refer to themselves as refugees. The most pertinent information to my mind comes from the most recent refugee from
S. Africa, a physician who still has family over there, those remaining soon to go to Canada. I triggered a discussion much more impassioned
and in depth than I expected when I mentioned to him once that the constitution of the new S. Africa under Mandela
was more friendly to personal freedom and diversity tthan our own. So began my education about private
police forces for families who could afford them, compounds of prosperous whites living in a state of seige
within armed and closed communities, etc. Now I hasten that I think Apartheid was unconscienable and I have absolutely no sympathy for the whites who treated blacks the way they did. NOTHING HAS CHANGED
about the growing instability of the governements where the gold is mined. Imagine how secure you would feel if the current occupant of the White House (either party) came on television and announced that the US has no need to fear a biological terrorist attack on US soil because the microbes themselves DID NOT CAUSE DISEASE!!
Mandela's successor has in effect made an equivalently ludicrous statement. It is his official position that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS! I did not believe until I ran it down in several separate news sources. The guy is a flake. I am generous. One might ask what does it matter if the president of S. Africa is a lunatic, but what if he decides his governemnt can run the mines better than the folks there now? Like nationalization. There are precedents. Remember any of them in oil? God I do date myself.
I look at those reserves in the bowels of S. Africa and my mouth waters. But I for one just can't keep money there.
I sold my minor positions in GOLD and HGMCY on Friday. The miners themselves will either ultimately
revolt or go extinct from HIV. The infection rate among miners as well as all black men is above 25% by recent conservative estimates and education is for the most part useless.
Now it is often said here that the cure for 10 dollar oil is 10 dollar oil. I have come to the (deluded?)
conclusion that the cure for $266US gold is $266US gold. The bubble is alive and well by any historic
standards in both S&P and DOW averages. Like Slider sometimes in a tiring way keeps repeating like a mantra, God bless him, it is in my own view as well, not IF but WHEN for gold price increases of large proportion (the number...I don't claim to have a clue). Thanks to Frank's excellent list of Sunday morning reading references we can still see all is not well with the world economy. And in the end I believe that fact is as pertinent to the price of gold as it is to the price of oil. My apologies to the thread for my wordiness but I love Africa, have since I was a kid,
having to wait until I was 47 to go, and I long to go back. But I am not putting my money there.
Like Der Weisse Engel (Olivier) kept asking his victims in "Marathon Man," "Is it safe? Is it safe?" (the Nazi pig!)
In my view, no. Good Sunday all.
Jim Black |
