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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bucky Katt who wrote (3394)	11/22/1997 10:38:00 AM
From: Bobby Yellin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116810

Templeton I think would agree with you..he said that governments would prevent deflation.. I know so little about the IMF and where it gets it funds from.. Anyways sounds like we are on the road to protectism and dividing the world into sectors again..this time around much messier and volatile than before..somebody said that Clinton felt off the hook with Iraq maybe getting quietly settled..geez if I were the countries next to Iraq I would be squirming..(at least we have the Atlantic and Pacific) ...when one messes around with those things..accidents do happen...but nobody seems to care...wonder if most of the politicos are on prozac? can't believe that Iraq has new allies when it is messing around with biological warfare..

To: Bucky Katt who wrote (3394)	11/22/1997 1:20:00 PM
From: philv	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116810

William, I have been pondering the narrow question of gold vs. money and money supply for some time, and have reduced this argument to simple terms (the only ones that I can understand) and have drawn a conclusion open for debate. If we had a dollar 100% backed by gold instead of paper money, new gold or the supply of gold would have to increase constantly (to mantain stable price) as human activity adds value and builds assets. For example, a building has value equal to the total effort put into it, and in my "100% gold" economy could be converted to gold (as well as all the other buildings now & in the future). If new gold is not found to cover this value, the price of the available gold must rise. To extend this picture world-wide, then all the gold would be equal to all of man's assets. I can't imagine what the POG might be, and this seems ridiculous. Limiting gold's role to just "floating" currency or cash also seems impossible as assets can all be converted at some point to cash (or gold) so we have the same problem. The man who goes out, cuts down trees, hews wood into boards & builds his house rightfully expects credit for his years of hard work. Gold too represents work and effort. It takes much effort & luck and many false starts (as most of us know) to make a mine. Now we have two men hard at work, the builder and the miner, and over a lifetime they have produced an equal amount of value. That is equilibrium, but this arrangement seems unfortunate, having two workers busy when only one has done something "useful". On a worldwide basis, the value of gold is a tiny fration of world assets. In our present economic system, the supply of money is being continuously increased, adjusted for the growing economy. This seems a reasonable thing to do, again trying to maintain a neutral position. In conclusion, gold is obviously scarce while money is plentiful, and an attempt to return to the gold standard is not possible unless gold were to rise to impossible values. Gold therefore remains a valuable and rare commodity with historic and nostalgic links to money. Any attempt to fall back to gold as a substitute currency would send the value to the heavens. These are just simple general observations with no attempt having been made to quantify my arguments. Go ahead, tear it apart, tell me I am wrong. Phil