>>>The reason I want to do this is that I believe the debasement to come in the years ahead is going to be much larger than many expect and I don't trust paper.<<<
I think so, too, but to me that means that gold miners with costs per ounce of anywhere from $800 on down to lower than $200 (depending on mine and location) will see their profits multiplying a lot faster than the price of gold itself. This simple arithmetic fact has not yet been grasped, or at least has not been believed in, by the great majority of people who imagine themselves to be investors.
I also find it much more interesting to follow the miners than I do to think about the gold in my safe deposit box. I did just add to the latter because I was offered a pendant that the owner thought was solid platinum. A physicist friend of mine and I determined that it was actually 18-carat gold, 38 grams of it, perhaps platinum plated. An easy test: you just weigh the piece in air and then suspend it in water, and dividing the difference into the air weight gives you the specific gravity, which turned out to be about 16, well below platinum (over 21). No way to know what the gold is alloyed with (without having a chemist do a quantitative analysis that would damage the pendant), but suspect it's copper, since this was a home-made casting. The pendant is rather interesting; it's a rough copy of something found in Crete called the Phaistos Disk, which is itself now thought by some archeologists to be a fake Mycenean art object, made by an Italian archeologist to try to make himself famous.
Well, I guess I am having some fun with gold. |
