ElM, the question is, which has the greater return on the current value over, say, the next 10 years or 20 years or 100 years.
Gold earns no interest, unless you lend it, in which case you don't have it any more and you only have a promise to get it back, which is no better than a government's promise to not ruin the money.
QCOM has to earn $50 a share in today's money to pay back the market value, and 10% a year to cover risk and profit. That's a LOT of money. Fortunately, people are paying a LOT for cyberphones and there are billions of people wanting cyberphones. Not to mention upgrades every couple of years. Plus they want BREW, Eudora, Eudora2Go, gpsOne, Globalstar, OmniTRACS and lots more besides.
Governments can confiscate gold and they can confiscate royalties, so neither is totally safe.
Meanwhile, people are digging gold flat out. Also, I'm working on my transmutation system, knocking a proton out of mercury to make gold. That will ding the price! There is a lot of mercury around. If I can develop techniques for shaking protons and neutrons loose, reformatting nuclei how I like, I'll even be able to make gold out of really cheap stuff, such as lead.
I just need to combine the four forces of the apocalyse in the right way so that with not much energy input, and a cunning Calabi-Yau equation, I can get a stream of gold running out the delivery end.
That'll be fun.
Mqurice |
