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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Salt'n'Peppa who wrote (157215)	9/18/2011 5:45:28 PM
From: GST	7 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206118

I am invested primarily in energy and precious metals -- and both for related reasons. The US is debasing its currency and energy and precious metals are as good as any means of which I am aware to protect my assets against this debasement. As for relevance -- it is the price of oil stupid! We are entering a brave new world for global energy investors -- the end of cheap oil, the end of cheap labor and the end of cheap credit. My largest energy position is apc -- I believe gas has a bright future and apc will ride it out no matter what happens in the larger stock market. I have some solar investment - a tragic mistake from a financial perspective, although solar has a role to play even if the industry goes through an extended bloodbath. The reason why the price of oil is so central to all investment is that energy is so central to our economy. Those who clamor for 'cheap oil' are living in the past and are unprepared for what is to come. As investors we need to prepare for oil that is both increasingly scarce, hard to extract and hard deliver to markets and taxed like hell at the point of consumption -- in other words, priced to reflect both the rising direct costs and the rising trillions in indirect costs that the knuckle dragging (said fondly) faction of our society cannot yet bring themselves to face. The rest of the world is willingly embracing higher energy costs -- and they will be the winners in the future economic struggles in the global economy. China already has tens of millions of electric vehicles on the road, with some estimates going as high as 100 million vehicles as of today -- and while these are by no means squeaky clean they do give China a giant head start going down this path -- ditto with wind and poor old long-suffering solar as well. They are building 28 nuke plants in China as we speak -- and so on. The idea that cheap oil is our salvation is as dumb as saying cheap heroin is our salvation. If you take the end of cheap oil to heart, not to mention the end of cheap labor and the end of cheap credit, you find an American economy that is teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. What we needed to compete on the global stage and to prosper is rapidly becoming obsolete - and we are going bankrupt trying to prop up the old guard. You can call this political, and at some level it is -- but certainly no worse that the trash and trash talk that seeps into half the posts on this thread. I leave you with this: If we are at the end of cheap oil, how would it impact your investment strategy? if the rest of the world is waking up to the need to tax oil to death -- and they are -- how does that affect the industry, other than the low rumble of red neck war drums? Oil is being repriced -- and it is a combination of soaring cost, both direct and indirect, and soaring taxation which is largely justified as a means to compensate for the tragic harm done by oil extraction and consumption. Investing in energy as if the good old days are here to stay is beyond myopic. Have a look at this thread -- it has become a toxic wasteland of political I would suggest to you that as investors we need to learn to tell the far right wing nut jobs to shut up and get on with investing in the real world.