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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (25559)	11/19/2002 2:03:39 PM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

do you have kangaroos or walloughbies in your back yard? You are evidently not a very good student of geography LOL

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (25559)	11/19/2002 4:42:46 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Jim. I've had a look at gold. I've looked down Martha Mine [Waihi], visited Johnson Matthey's 'store' in Grafton Road - also here Message 18252251 to ogle gold in the flesh and see if the mood took me to buy. I've watched Aztec wearing gold chains, crosses and other baubles. I've seen gold here and there on statues and stuff. I know it's used in electronics and other 'serious' applications. Gold looks, in every way, like some medieval anachronism. We still have anachronisms around, but I prefer to avoid them. There is such a tiny amount of gold in the world that it's unfit to form a monetary system. People would end up filtering the oceans to get more of it. Which would be an absurd waste of effort when a perfectly fine $ pixelating machine is available at near-zero cost. I agree that housing, dollar and autos 'should' decline. It looks like a no-brainer. However, my experience is that using 'no brains' is hazardous to health. For decades, the Yen, the dollar and others 'should' have declined against the NZ$ and Rupee and Yuan and others on a purchasing power parity hamburger test. But the differentials remain, decade after decade. A sister in law in the USA has recently paid NZ$700,000 for a pokey little non-descript two bedroom house on the edge of a minor city in California. The idea horrifies me. Especially since it included a hefty mortgage. I could buy a row of palaces here in similar locations for that money. Or, a splendid country estate with 30 acres and a large house. I could employ a herd of Indians for decades for that price [even Brahmins]. I could buy some small African countries and have change left over [well, that might be a slight exaggeration]. But it would not surprise me if USA house prices stay up and the US$ does too. Such is the power of the USA and the attraction of it as an investment destination. We have few Irwin Jacobs types here and those who are here, go there. We are nearly 3 years into the biggest financial adjustment ever as legions of miscreant investors, day traders, speculators and stochastic variable standard deviants are realigned with their personal realities. It has been quite a spectacular period of time to have lived through. Weirdly, each day seems normal, but there really has never been anything like it. The 1929 frenzy was comparable, but the world was agrarian then. Now it's urban and tail-end industrial. What is amazing is how easily the adjustments have been made [so far]. Though we are not out of the woods yet. People have gone back to work, cancelled their Cessna Citation orders, drink plonk instead of Dom Perignon and don't eat at Windows on the World. americanhistory.si.edu The Wealth Effect economic turbo boost has gone, along with the dot.com irrational exuberance, along with the biotech mania and the telecosmic transcendence. Such a confluence of infectious greed with Millennium excitement thrown in and globalisation for good measure was a wonder to behold. Not all for naught, but definitely cut down to size. To have come through all that almost unscathed [in the big picture - of course individuals have been ruined and individual tragedies have resulted] is amazing. There was also the Asian Contagion, USSR/Russia implosion, Mexico's default, Argentina, Brazil, Japan's banking and economic woes and a few other glitches. Yet there has been no collapse into mayhem. There has been a gradual realignment [fairly fast really]. I had for years worried about a self-sustaining, cascading, going through the stops free-fall, collapse with an overwhelming of adjustment process. I think we are far to far down the realignment trajectory for cascading collapse [though I suppose there is still plenty of room for foolish economic decisions such as trade barriers, war or financial laws to foul the nest and cause panic and an implosion into the biggest black hole of war, insurrection, riot, financial destruction and death the world has ever seen - people are still only human, though with a higher average IQ than those who supervised the WWI to WWII shambles]. Mqurice