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

To: carranza2 who wrote (76420)	7/16/2011 4:48:43 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218131

C2, I have always found it very useful to know what the mob is doing and thinking. Preferably, what they will do and think when I present them with my latest new-fangled idea. But also to avoid being in the mob at the wrong time. I have never been in a mosh pit and have no intention of starting now. That could have been written in 1980: < It is unfortunate that you do not understand. If bricks or old mops exhibited the current market behavior of gold, I would be in bricks and old mops. It is about making a profit, pure and simple, and preserving wealth. Gold is just an instrument like many others > The Hunt brothers had similar thinking with silver, and tried to corner the market to enjoy even greater gains. Ooops a daisy. I have no antipathy to those who buy gold. It's a less harmful activity than my golfing which involves creating noise, fumes, [to take the car there], personal injury [minor normally though being hit with a high-flying ball certainly hurts - I hit somebody in a group which had called us to play up]. Gold buyers are about as harmless a group as I can imagine. My antipathy is to owning gold. And even that is really only because of the transaction costs, storage costs, risk of loss. I had a stash of silver coins when I was young and somebody stole them. Lesson learned. Friends and family are not to be trusted with silver [and presumably gold]. My sooths, the most highly precise gold price predictions seen anywhere on the planet, show this is wrong: <Your arguments pale when compared to the judgment made by the markets. All your well-crafted circumlocutions, analogies, reasons, criticisms, pointed irony, etc., are irrelevant when compared to the results. It means that you are wrong but refuse to acknowledge your error. > When the reality matches my predictions, what else do you want? Gold is a good measuring stick for mob mentality. Coldly rational engineers and scientists like good measuring sticks: <If you truly autistic about gold, I should think you wouldn't go on and on about it. > I go on and on about mob mentality because that's a very important aspect of reality with which I must cope. Not because I have an emotional relationship with gold. NGD eh? Hmmm.... interesting. Never heard of that. It's tempting to conduct a transaction to join in with the mob mentality. Watch this space. Thanks for the suggestion. Mqurice

To: carranza2 who wrote (76420)	7/16/2011 8:47:31 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218131

Gold is just an instrument like many others Gold is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. Like anything else, it's based upon marketing and consumer perception in determining it's value. But for the folks who bought Gold in the 1980's, they saw it's value plummet for years before it bottomed around 2001 at $271/ounce. nma.org But the Gold Bugs are good at selling their story of Gold as a storehouse of value, so the trade is working, for now.. I look at Gold much like I perceive oil (except that oil is a perishable commodity). Would be ever be tempted to back our currency with oil? No. But is having a huge resource base of gold the best way to determine the strength of an economy? Imagine some little country discovers billions of ounces of gold within it's borders. Does extracting that Gold make for a well diversified economy? No. Not anymore than oil has led to diversified economies in the OPEC nations. It's only when they see that resource diminish that they take some of that wealth and invest in other asset classes/businesses. And like the history of Spain, having accumulated massive wealth through conquest doesn't make for a sound economic foundation. The productivity of our people should be the determination of our economic strength. The ability to take resources or technology and add value by creating something which consumers demand even more of. To take on debt, which is paid off by profit from the items/services provided is a better measure of economic potential. So while I acknowledge the perception the market has of gold, if our economic potential solely depended upon the quantity of the substance available to back our currency, it would be highly deflationary, and it would deny capital to those entrepreneurs who take on debt, and then pay it off through their operational profits. And it's obvious that, for right now, our level of debt is extreme and not being matched by profit potential in many of our businesses so deleveraging is in order to bring things back into a reasonable balance. And, of course, we need to get government to stop issuing debt and mis-allocating taxpayer resources. All they are doing is propping up the failed banks by lending them money from the Fed at near 0% and then having the taxpayers pay them interest on the increased national debt. If government must become the borrower of last resort, then the money should be spent on R&D that yields a long-term ROI that the private market is unwilling to finance. And it should be spent on supporting our small businesses for the purpose of retraining and retaining worker skills. Investment with an ROI should be the standard for government spending. Hawk

To: carranza2 who wrote (76420)	7/16/2011 10:14:26 PM
From: RJA_	3 Recommendations Respond to of 218131

C2, Maurice is a very stubborn guy. If he decides to defend a position, even if it is un defend-able (such as his record on gold), he will do so by any means, including kicking up a cloud of wordy dust and disappearing in it. You are left to argue with the cloud. Maurice told me here in roughly 2005 not to buy gold, and if I had, get out of it because it was a bad investment. Gold if memory serves was roughly just on the north side of 500 at that time. My reply to him was that I had lived through the 70's, had participated in the PM run at that time, and that this looked pretty similar to me. My take from that and all that has followed, is that Mq will change his mind if and when he is ready, and if he has changed it, he might not tell you about it, and continue to argue the same position, regardless of the investment merit of the opposite, even as it has been proven over time. Mq has lots of arguments for same, including that there is always tomorrow, a correct fact for at least the last 10 years... Be well. I appreciate your contributions here.