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

To: Mark Bartlett who wrote (26926)	1/24/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: donald martin	Respond to of 116814

<<Perhaps what needs to be discussed here is the concept of "free market".>> Fair enough. <<In my mind, a free market is one where the participants stand or fall by their decisions, not one where certain players supposedly get "so big" that their failure can not be permitted, and they are thrown a set of economic crutches.>> If my father took all his retirement assets and bot gold with them in 1996 and now didn't have money to pay his gas bill, I'd help him out. Would that be manipulative? Governments/central banks are participants in the markets as well. Just because you and I don't approve of what they do (and I for one don't like the "hidden" costs of those economic crutches) doesn't make them any less a participant in the market. Just like you or me. They just have a bigger footprint is all. That this goes on, though, just underscores what a good buy gold is right now. The short-term price of gold is meaningless to me. These bail-outs you all are griping about will serve to erode the discipline of the market in the long-term. Higher gold prices in the future will be the hernia, if you will, of the global currency markets. <<Free markets also mean equal access to all the available information ..... seems to me that we have a situation where certain groups are permitted access to certain information, not available to others.>> I don't accept that as a condition for a free market. If I live next door to a Walmart and I notice the traffic count drop precipitously one month, and take a short position as a result that I later profit from, that doesn't make the market for Walmart shares "not free". And we can't all have equal access to that information. There is a cost to information. Whether it's in the form of a subscription fee to the Wall Street Urinal or Barrons', or the cost of your internet connection so you can peruse the SEC's EDGAR site, or the time and effort you put in to calling mining company executives and/or visiting mine site, information costs something. No one has any special entitlement to it. And no, no one ever gets ALL of the available information. And as far as the information you need to trade gold, there's really only 3 numbers you need. There's currently a little over 4.1 billion oz of gold above ground right now. New production is coming in at around 80 to 85 million ounces per year. Jewelry demand alone is running over 100 million ounces per year. (Thanks and my gratitude to Claude Cormier for this data.) <<and I certainly do not believe that one group should be allowed to become so leveraged, the very survival of many world economies depends on their survival>> So you're just going to find ANOTHER group, to oversee THAT group, upon whom the survival of many world economies will depend? Well, I appreciate that the thrust here was to discuss what constitutes a free market. Maybe I should give some examples of what I consider NOT to be free markets to contrast. If you have a labor market, where the "minimum" going wage is $5/hour, and I'm willing to go to work RIGHT now at the highest offer, and someone (but no one else) would be willing to hire me for $4/hour but not more, and as a result of the "minimum" wage rule of $5/hour I can NOT go to work for that person...THAT is not a free market. If you have an apartment rental market where the government says you can only rent out a 2 BR apartment for $400/month, and I need a 2 BR apartment and I'm willing to pay $600/month, and I find such an apartment, and the owner would accept $600/month but because of the $400/month rule, he won't rent to me...THAT is not a free market.