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

To: Ilaine who wrote (34053)	5/20/2003 2:27:39 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

CB, what deflation? At 0.1% deflation I could die of old age before I get a 2% discount. I could get that by paying cash. As they said in The Matrix, "There is no spoon". Well, there is no deflation. And Uncle Al controls the spigot which ensures "There is no deflation". On the other hand, the accusation is that his opening of the spigot is causing inflation. But prices are stable or dropping, added up and divided by the total to get an average. So "There is no inflation". People seem to want to panic about horrendous inflation and horrendous deflation at the same time. They are literally insane. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. The level of water in the glass is exactly midway. It isn't half full and getting fuller or half empty and getting emptier. It is sitting pretty, right there in the middle. Which is what the money managers are supposed to do with it. Keep it stable. Stop counterfeiting. Stop theft. They have been doing an admirable job. Easy though it is to do, thanks to burgeoning demand, populations, economic growth, technological development and absence of major glitches such as comet splashdowns, noocular wars or genocidal madness [though some are keen on it]. Gold and Uncle Al are competing safe havens. Sometimes one gets the upper hand, sometimes the other. I like intelligence rather than Aztec mysticism so I'll bet on Uncle Al. He likes gold because it keeps the central bankers honest, by showing them what the masses think of their machinations. But you can't run an umpty trillion economy on a few tonnes of gold worth not much more than sea shells or any other found object which can act as a shiny bauble for the easily impressed. Making it worth $5000 an ounce would create a madness for gold akin to Easter Islanders building big heads. It'll keep a lot of people off the golf course and maybe that's a good thing. I prefer fun to digging for gold. I've peered into the Martha Mine at Waihi and while it's fun to blow up rocks and drive big machines, it isn't really useful. Except that they will have a nice deep lake at the end of it, which should be fun for the local children. Imagine the world covered with frantic gold miners, and the ocean being pumped through gold filters, in an effort to find more of the stuff - at $5000 an ounce, it would be worth it. It's madness! All one really needs to do to provide a monetary method is pixelate a promise. Near-zero marginal cost of production. Totally safe, can't be stolen or diluted by anyone. No counterfeiting which is what new gold production is. The worry is that the pixelators are pixilated and will go nuts with the mouse, clicking like crazy to produce more and more and more, like the brooms filling the well in the Mickey Mouse Fantasia. That at the behest of the greedy morons running the electorate, they'll fire the sensible and install the mystical ignorant at the spigot. There's a fine tradition of monetary managers printing everyone into poverty by destroying the trust. Most people wouldn't have a clue and would think [if they thought] that the gummint ought to just print more money because that's what people need. People are generally weak on causal relationships and also weak on imagining the future, especially if it means deferring gratification. Hence, promised money is always at the mercy of the mob who carry little loyalty to a promise, even if they know there was one made, which many of them don't. Gold is less at the mercy of the ignorant mob, venal politicians and wacky monetary managers. Mqurice