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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (80472)	9/27/2011 2:41:52 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Respond to of 217852

by gad... nicely done Kasper Gutman There are no guarantees..

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (80472)	9/27/2011 3:01:00 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217852

Everything - naturally - is only worth what others are willing to exchange for it, be it USD, gold, cowrie shells, etc. That is a given, so apparent as to not be worthy of discussion. The point is to analyze, go far into history, deduce, induce, examine, and intuit why some things retain value and some do not and why some things have throughout history retained relatively more value than others. And, then, apply the lessons learned to our present condition. That is much of what MacroMan does and which even CroMagnon Man did though he did not know what he was doing as he was simply reacting instinctively, with little interference from sophists like us. The things we have learned are numerous but can be put in a nutshell. First, the rarer and more desirable the object, the better it serves as a store of value. Second, things which can be easily made and replicated, i.e., are essentially replicable and fungible, do not serve well as a store of value because any Tom, Dick or Henri can replicate them. Third, a corollary of number two, is that paper currency which is not particularly well-managed with respect to its issuance, is always overprinted to serve political ends. Thus, no unbacked paper currency has ever survived. Many cease to exist, many simply wither away in hyperinflation but none, zero, survive in the long run. You may thank the pols for that. Gold is non-wasting, rare, non-replicable and if .9999 fine, utterly fungible. Diamonds suffer from the fact that they are not fungible in that different qualities are appreciated differently by collectors. A nice yellow diamond is worth more than a plain jane diamond of the same size. And, as they are now being synthetically produced, are replicable. The same problems afflict art. Truffles and saffron not to mention fine wines are too delicious to use as stores of value, though they are extremely rare. And, naturally, some are better than others, defeating the fungibility requirement. What are we left with that is rare, not replicable but is fungible and plastered onto our DNA? Gold and silver and, increasingly, platinum. So much of a store of value that history proves their inherent properties which you have not deemed sufficient to convince you. I will not go into the record, but will suggest to you the example of the treasure hunters. They do not expend their efforts on a worthless cause. And some have done very well, including the ones who recently discovered the 200 tons of silver in 15,000 ft. of water in the N. Atlantic. Yes, gold is real. The price is not. Why not? Everything is worth whatever anyone wishes to pay for it. That millions of human beings agree on a certain price for an ounce of gold means that they see the same value for it. The tulip worshippers failed to see that their tulips did not last long enough to make them valuable. Gold and the PMs are eternal. Put them in a safe box and they will be in the same form centuries from now. Now, please tell me why I am wrong. My reply, in advance, is: "Just look at the price charts, Mq." You may ignore them as you see fit but the precious metals' surge in prices as against overprinted currencies certainly suggests that my sophistry is clearly superior to yours. C'est tout.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (80472)	9/27/2011 10:21:09 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217852

Read this NYT article describing how some UK encyclopedia made an enormous mistake concerning ice losses in Greenland due to AGW. The interesting thing to me was that the NYT soft peddled the easy acceptance of some horribly bad data, i.e., accepting the wholesale proposition that Greenland had lost 15% of its ice rather than one tenth of one percent. The NYT should have inquired instead about the process which lead to such an egregious mistake. One gets the feeling that it was looking desperately for a way to justify such an error, not that the NYT could do so without risking major embarrassment itself. Actually, I am surprised the story was printed. Almost as bad as not understanding why gold is an eternal currency: nytimes.com