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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chowder who wrote (3216)	7/29/2001 6:30:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Respond to of 206099

Thanks for that very thorough consideration of foreign markets and currencies. All analogies are false and lazy, as opposed to discovering and laying out the actual truth, but I keep thinking of the analogy of the United States in terms of a very prominent figure in business and politics in the city I live in. This person got himself a lot of money, a lot of friends, and a lot of local poltical power by hard work, honesty, intelligence, and other goo character qualities, having come from nowhere econmically and socially. But upon reaching middle age and having been president of a bank, head of the chamber of commerce, "chairmanof many committees" (thank you, T. S. Eliot), and mayor of the city, he achieved such prestige that no one can seem to se anything wrong with what he has done since. He steered a Home Loan bank into bankruptcy in the 1980s, but has become executor of a huge charitable estate and trust, and enjoys contued esteem, though everything he does is either routine, misguided, or parasitical. In similar fashion, I think the United States is enjoying a great deal of confidence in its capital and equity markets, and having its currency honored, far beyond what reality warrants. But who knows how long it can go on? Like Thomas Jefferson, who died not just bankrupt, but bequeathing huge unpaid debts to his posterity, we find that the world looks to us for economic guidance and trust. Without a gold standard (which I am glad we don't have), we can go on running trade deficits and exporting dollars for a very long time. All I know to do as an investor and saver (not in that order) is to act according to my perceptions of reality. My perception is that the dollar is not as overvalued as Amazon and Yahoo and Cisco, etc., were, but that it definitely has left reality behind. I would not bet against the dollar in a dangerously leveraged way, speculating in foreign currency futures. But I am definitely trying to hedge our family net value against some future decline of the dollar.