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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Slagle who wrote (23467)	10/4/2007 1:49:00 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217825

I'm not so sure that free coinage of silver would have worked out well. With the development the floatation process for recovering copper and lead ores, there would have been considerable associated silver that would be cheap to recover. That silver would have result in continuing excess money issuance, which would be to some degree self-reinforcing, as the silver content would have made copper cheaper, accelerating the spread of electrification, which would then increase the demand for copper. The excess money supply would help manufacturers and debtors at the expense of savers, and helped property owners at the expense of the poor who only own currency. An enormous number of people, and many immigrants, where employed by the metal mining industries in the 1890s, especially for copper and lead. Free coinage of silver might have resulted in 20% of the US economy being devoted to silver mining, and massive over-investment. ************** Some gold bug skeptics are concerned that the heap leaching process for gold recovery, along with the discovery of Carlin type disseminated gold deposits in Nevada, Australia, and other places, has made gold too readily available form miners. Gold as a store of value works best when there is lots of gold above ground, and relatively little being used in a non-recoverable way and little being mined. The mining of new gold would ideally track the population and to some degree, inflation corrected long term world GDP growth. Having massive amounts of low cost gold in giant, extensively drilled tested deposits, is a little like having gold in bank about 500 miles away. It then makes sense to do things like gold leasing and sales. That makes it easier to finance a new mine, a larger mine, and more mines. If we do need see gold go over $1200 in the next 7 years, it may be because of excess mining has moved it towards an industrial metal instead of a store of value.