Hi TJ - Hope you get better soon. For coughs, the Brach's Starlight mints Pepermint will surpress a cough for about 30 minutes. Maybe useful if you can't get real cough drops or get tired of the taste.
I once used a very effective cough drop that tasted something like diesel fuel mixed with beeswax....
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Re: extended family - How effective have you been in getting them to make appropriate investments, buy Tamiflu, and take other measures ?
Most of us on SI have had mixed success with influencing extended family members.
******** (a)
Platinum - seems really high to me. One major market is catalytic converters. Much platinum is recovery and recycled from older converters. Also, until recently, both Platinum Pt and Palladium Pd (much cheaper) could be used for various types of cat converters for gasoline engines, only Pt could be used for diesels.
Now there are ways to use some Pd with Pt for diesels.
Some Big SUVs have TWO big cat converters. When those vehicles get replaced with a smaller vehicle, there will be 2 recoveries but only ONE new converter.
The two above factors could really hit Pt demand.
Which leaves jewelry. At > 2x the price of gold, Pt seems pricey to me. Since most jewerly uses 22 or 20 karat, because pure 24K gold is too soft (you can indent pure gold with a strong fingernail), the real price ratio gets closer to 2.5 X for Pt over gold.
Not sure how popular that price will be.
On the supply side, expansion of nickle minig tends to result in some additional platinum by product.
Also, $ 1000 is a BIG ROUND NUMBER, where I expect lots of selling and price resistance.
I'm thinking about swaping my few Pt coins for Ag silver...
****** (f) Coconut endowment
Good decision. I can't think of any paper currency instrument which won't have a large negative return - like -60% in real value - over the next 15 years.
Maybe real estate, once it drops more ;-)
****** (g) Monetary reset
I think montery reset will tend to be process, not an event
I learned that from you.
How will it unfold ? Maybe each commodity gets 15 minutes of fame, or time on stage. Some will make multiple appearnces.
Oil at $ 70 then back to $55, which is still way more than original $ 35-40 level.
Copper at almost $2.00
Platinum at $1000
Sugar, wheat, coal, etc.
So this may mean it may be useful to trade among commodities at different times, while retaining some core holdings for emergencies.
I also expect there will be a peak price overshoot, like the $ 800 gold in the 1970s...which then went to $350. Even selling on the down side post peak at $600 or $550 looked smart two years later.
Looked even smarter if you bought long term treasuries then, which paid 14 5 at one time (early Volker)
******* (h)
I prefer RMB to GWB.
******* (i) Euro
Well, the French now have a way to create more demand for their auto industry ;-)
Euro can be a useful excahnge medium for buying undervalued property in "Eastern Europe". A certain national "reversion to mean" process occuring...maybe not strongly correlated with much of the rest of the world economy.
******* (j)
AUD- not sure how much Aussie military spending is, but I don't think it is like the US.
About 6-8 years ago, Aussies had a number of financial problems because of LOW commodity prices - banks, insurance companies went bust, fraud uncovered, etc. So they may be more robust and more cautious than certain countries which can print reserve currencies....
>>>> 2006 ? It should be a good year. Expectations are low.... |
