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Gold/Mining/Energy : Barrick Gold (ABX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russet who wrote (2935)	5/20/2002 6:46:06 PM
From: Enigma	Respond to of 3558

FF email this to your pal at Memorial and let him give us his point by point rebuttal? And Nickle let us have his credentials as one of the most respected figures in academia?

To: russet who wrote (2935)	5/20/2002 8:17:24 PM
From: nickel61	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3558

"has examined the chart for over one hundred years, and the sideways to downwards drift for the POG is obvious for the large majority of years in that longer term." You have made this assertion again and again." And it is pattenly false. How do you take gold in US dollar terms and say that it is sideways to down for the last hundred years. That is absurd. Gold was $20.25/ounce for most of the nineteenth century and rose in value to $40/ounce in 1934. With the 1960s it was allowed to rise to $42/ounce and then when the convertability of the US dollar to gold was totally severed in 1970 it rose to $150/ounce by 1978 and eventually to an average of $350-$450/ounce from the late seventies through 1996. THat is $20.25 to $416/ounce in March of 1996 or a TWENTY FOLD INCREASE in the last hundred years...how the hell do you call that sideways to down???? OR maybe you have redefined what it is measured in? GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

To: russet who wrote (2935)	5/20/2002 8:19:09 PM
From: nickel61	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3558

Just to clarify what I just said. Barrick sells an ounce of borrowed gold today at $312 and invests in a five year US treasury note yeilding 5% to maturity in May of 2007. That is 5% compounded for five years which allows them to claim a "sale" price of $398/ounce!!!!!!!!! Yes that is as simple as it is...The whole process is bullshit unless you somehow think they are doing something else for you...they aren't it is just they are more aggressive about dressing it up...PERIOD. The plan looked somewhat feasible in a constantly declining market but is absurd in a rising gold market...It is market manipulation (through the selling of additional gold into the spot market when the short is established) and then just plain bs when the books claim that they got a "premium" which is nothing more then the compounding of the proceeds they got from shorting their own product. The game came about because they wanted to push the spot price of gold lower to take out the other competitors and it happened to work with the big picture financial interests of the world financial community. Namely a lower gold price meant that the US Treasury could inflate the value of the US dollar and our trading partners went along with it because it allowed them to export to the US market with a low currency price for their production and stimulate economic activity in their domestic markets. The US gets to print money with no perception in the financial markets of the amount being excessive because the US dollar is able to show a rising trend against it's historical benchmark of gold and therefore there is no inflation, and we can continue to inflate the US dollar money supply almost without check. Nice game if you can pull it off. Barrick of course is just a minor player in this drama, but their participation is critical if you wanted to ensure that the price of gold would continue under pressure.