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Gold/Mining/Energy : Barrick Gold (ABX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (1208)	5/6/1999 11:58:00 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3558

Jim Grant is a kook. He's been around for a long time and if you closely followed him, you'd find you'd be better off with Lehman. Ask Lou Ruykeiser. He's a hard money 'Bug. He also is a balanced budget hawk to the extreme degree such that during the '80s he was against lowering taxes because it would raise the budget deficit and thereby cause inflation. A has nothing to do with B which has nothing to do with C. Since these factors are no longer apparently around, the kooks don't trot them out in order to induce Americans to shoot themselves in the foot one more time. Never fear. Guys like Grant are still around to do us that disservice. He represents some form of abstract idealism which is basically false, but appeals when people are fearful. He quotes Hyman and Lazar who are bearish in economic activity, bullish in bonds and neutral in gold. Those three views are exactly wrong and evidenced accordingly. His own position is that the world is deflating. How can these guys get away with these patently false claims? There is now no country in the world which is deflating. I guess he means deflating relative to 10% inflation. The FED's official view is that a little inflation never hurt anyone. This was McChesney-Martin's subtle and major mistake. Grant's philosophy is that you need to harden money. Everyone should carry pennies, nickels, and dimes, for transactional purposes. Hard money kooks are no better than the soft money socialists. The form of money is completely irrelevant. Credit does not stimulate inflation. They are disjoint economic concepts. The way to maintain integrity in money is to let the free market determine the conversion rate of the different forms. Grant doesn't trust free markets and prefers a rule written in stone.