A lot of people are wondering why silver is not going up.
It is quite simple. Gold is money, the one and only true money. Silver is not money, ceased to be money around 1870 or so. People are buying gold in expectation of an increase in monetary demand. The imminent collapse of fiat moneys will boost demand for gold, not silver.
Why is gold money? Network effects. It is money because it is money, and silver is not money because it is not money. Gold is money because large numbers of people expect large numbers of other people to treat it as money.
Silver was money because ancient China had silver but not gold. After that, hysteresis set in.
Network effects need a jump-starter. Gold is superior to silver as money. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html
Every blog goes through a lifecycle. After a few years, the blogger is usually out of new ideas and is just rehashing old ones. This is true even of the best blogs. Many have turned back and no longer blog.
When you say, “Buying gold,” what does that mean? They’re physically taking posession of it and loading it into their safes at home? They’re buying bags of gold coins and sticking them in their safes?
If so, what are their concrete plans for buying groceries with it come a monetary collapse? Personally, I think the knowledge of someone paying for something in gold after a monetary collapse would be very interesting to criminals in such a situation. You can protect such assets with firearms, etc, but there are times when you won’t be home to guard your safe and they’ll just come in then.
If people aren’t physically taking posession of it, how is “buying gold” different than buying any other stock, bond, REIT, or commodity on some exchange?
I expect most gold buying is of ETFs. It is different than buying any other financial asset in that the ETF is buying gold based on money inflow. Thus, your ownership of it is virtual gold ownership. If you expect gold to outperform other things, then it is going to be better than a bond, stock, etc.
My “concrete plans” in the event of hecto-inflation are not selling my GLD, at least not for groceries. The GLD funds my retirement, perhaps college for a kid, a house, etc. Note that the scenario I expect for the dollar is substantial inflation, but not hyperinflation. Not a currency collapse except insofar as you consider reducing the dollar to the value of a penny to be that. This will cause serious economic problems, but I don’t think it will go to apocalypse.
Gold is an investment grade currency. Silver is a daily transaction currency. The people trying to hedge with gold are of the investment class. The end of the world folks are mostly into silver.
PRCalDude says:
You know what is perfect protection from thieves? Owning nothing valuable.
You’re arguing that you shouldn’t buy gold because it will be so valuable that people will want to steal it?
No, I’m asking about the concrete application of “buying gold.” You can own valuable things as long as thieves don’t know you have them. If you pay for things with gold or silver, people inherently know you have gold and silver. But you’re also wrong, people who “own nothing” get robbed all the time in the ghetto. Most reactionaries think they’re Rambo though so maybe they don’t care.
This is the only guy I know of who knows anything about gold in a post-apocalyptic scenario. Goldism is more of a religion in the US than anything else. Assessing and buying a bunch of 18k jewelry seems like an awful lot of work.
It’s definitely not something you’re going to receive compounding returns on.
This runup in GOLD is interesting, I hope everyone’s not banking their entire retirement on it.
It is not that reactionaries think they are Rambo, but reactionaries typically live in a safe neighborhood where the locals would not rob them, and outsiders have to drive up a private road, and the dogs will bark at outsiders. So a couple of thieves show up, the old lady at the corner looks at them, the dog barks. They get out to rob the house, and, in a apocalyptic situation, they are dead real fast. They are outsiders, the locals know each other, and outsiders are odd and threatening.
Any place where you depend on the police for protection is unsafe. Reactionaries have generally fled unsafe places.
Some people are physically buying gold. Most are not, but when apocalypse comes in sight, they attempt to take physical possession of the gold they own on paper. Increasing numbers of people who own gold on paper are taking physical possession. If things continue to worsen, more people will do so.
If apocalypse goes all the way, as in Zimbabwe and Cambodia, then people will pay with little bits of gold, cut off with a knife. They will use trillion dollar bills to wrap the little bits of gold.
If we don’t go all the way to apocalypse, they will use intermediary institutions, pay either by selling gold, or by transferring title to paper gold.
If gold is money, the price of silver is going down. If dollars are money, going up.
The Zimbabwean situation was interesting because the state just used thugs to run all the whites out and take their land. The reactionaries there never mounted an armed resistance and, even if they had, the US would have bombed them. There, though, people probably just exchanged their wheelbarrows full of money into alternative currencies if they could, not gold. Unfortunately, there are none willing to tell the story of how they escaped, and the natives themselves were the savages contributing to the problem in the first place. It seems to me that defensible land was actually the biggest liability in the case of Zimbabwe. Anyone can be run off of any piece of land.
As FerFAL describes in Argentina, when things become post-apocalyptic the thugs have State protection, so you essentially have to be willing to physically fight the State to retain your property.
Titles of gold don’t seem to be worth much unless you exercise your rights physically take posession of your gold before the S actually HTF, kind of like selling your McMansion before the stream of Even Greater Fools dried up. After TSHTF, the people who hold your gold for you will probably just laugh at your title when you come to take posession of it and put the boots to you, medium-style.
In Zimbabwe, people were paying with gold dust and fragments of gold.
“If you need soap you have to pay in gold, no Zimbabean dollarsâ€
To the best of my knowledge, this is what usually happens when there is a full on hyperinflation.
Alright, I’m convinced. What’s a good source of bullion and/or coins?
PRdude,
I buy most of my gold and silver on ebay. I have bought from time to time on APMEX because they will take a check that you mail them, which gives you some time to transfer funds to clear.
Unless you are sharp and know how to avoid getting cheated, I would stick to APMEX and Gainesville Coins. Both have reasonable premiums and shipping. If you are buying $10,000 or more Tulving has the best prices, but I never spend that much at once on bullion.
The biggest reason to buy at least some silver is that when TSHTF you won’t want to be spending a gold coin worth $200 or more (today’s purchasing power) to buy a loaf of bread, and cutting pieces off a gold coin to do so isn’t the best solution. Silver dimes (all 1964 and previous dimes) are 1/14th of a troy ounce of silver, worth about $3 at today’s prices. I have a lot of silver dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars as well as gold coins (about 2/3 gold to 1/3 silver in value).
The reactionaries there never mounted an armed resistance and, even if they had, the US would have bombed them.
Errrr. Soldier of Fortune magazine was pretty much made as a venue for recruiting white mercenaries to fight on the side of the reactionaries in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. The US didn’t have to bomb them to make them lose, as I recall, but I’m sure you are right that had the choice been between bombing the reactionaries and letting them win, we would have bombed them. Of course, Mugabe promised not to do what he eventually did, and, initially, it seems he believed that the US and UK would hold him to the promise. As he figured out that they wouldn’t hold him to it, he broke it. Similarly, I fearlessly predict that if S Aftrican whites take up arms against their oppressors then we will stop them from winning, bombing them if necessary.
This “we keep forgetting to fight” thing that rightists are fond of saying is a delusion. The Rhodesians fought and lost. The right has squared off against the left in several hot wars including WWI, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the English Civil War. The right keeps losing. Whatever the right’s problem is, it isn’t not fighting.
The right’s position in the revolutionary war was morally dubious, in the civil war very dubious, and World War II utterly indefensible. This facilitated broad left center alliances against the right. If Hitler’s program had not involved the eradication the French and the ethnic cleansing of the Russians, I am sure Churchill would have been more amenable to Hitler’s peace proposals, but on the face of it, the proposal was to postpone anglophones to be eaten last. Similarly, the Japanese program involved the eradication of Australians. That is a wee bit too far right wing for my tastes. If Hitler’s program had only involved the ethnic cleansing of the Russians, probably Churchill would have been fine with that, but people tend to forget that in Hitler’s book he proposed to solve the French problem permanently, while not proposing any lasting solution for the Slav problem.
In the case of Rhodesia, however, it was the left’s position that was morally dubious, and with the passage of time its immorality has become more obvious. Presumably the next Rhodesia will fight harder, and likely have more allies, and the left fewer.
The left, being theocratic, moves ever lefter. As it moves ever lefter, its behavior becomes ever worse. After what happened to the Rhodesians, and what is starting to happen to the South Africans, they will have a narrower alliance in the next war.
Slavery, however, as not as bad as represented. Reading up on old books, it is apparent that slave owners acted towards their slaves as dictatorial governments towards their subjects, most allowing them the liberty to be productive, a few engaging in capricious, but infrequent, terror, torture and murder. Liberty to be productive was generally a more rational and profitable policy – which did not, however, guarantee that that was always the policy followed. The abolish slavery program should be judged therefore as similar to the export democracy program (which is not working out well, though Gaddaffi is worse than most, so that intervention will be less disastrous than most)
The practical effect of the civil war was to reduce the status of whites to that of the better treated slaves, which is to say, to reduce the status of whites to that of the great majority of slaves, but it did free all slaves from the continual fear of the possibility of severe mistreatment. The civil war guaranteed everyone a tolerably benevolent owner all the time.
IDK about that. When you google “Rhodesia,” you get a bunch of wacky results from either white supremacists or a couple of Wikipedia entries. It’s as if the entire country never existed. I did find one article in Time about the Anglo-American alliance at the UN trying to sanction Rhodesia during the 1960s.
I saw a thing on the Military Channel about Executive Outcomes – a South African Boer predecessor to groups like Xe/Blackwater and, though they were paranthetically successful in stopping genocides in places like Angola, KKKlinton et al made sure that they were disbanded and the genocides promptly resumed.
I’m all ears for some accurate histories of Rhodesia. I doubt they exist. I saw something on PBS recently about white farmers being run off their land in Zimbabwe and I couldn’t sleep at night. These people seemed to have an extremely naive view of African justice, meaning they believed in it.
I said WWI. Hitlerism isn’t recognizably on the right.
I’m not sure what morality has to do with things. I’m just making a factual claim that the right has a good record of violent resistance coupled with a poor won-loss record.
I’d agree that the Civil War was less immoral than the Revolution, but both were pretty far from moral. Avoiding the fate of Canada was not worth a war. Freeing the slaves earlier was not worth the war that was fought, and I don’t see how either is really a close call.
It’s true of course that these wars were easier to fight because they were seen by elites as moral or even morally imperative. That progressive elements of the elite justify their behavior via self-righteous preening is true but not analytically useful IMO.
The next Rhodesia will be crushed like a bug unless the US has collapsed by then or it (the next Rhodesia) happens in China’s or Russia’s near abroad where the US can’t safely determine outcomes. Well, that’s too strong. We can’t exactly determine outcomes. More like we can prevent any side or sides we choose from forming a government.
Self righteous preening is not just feel good posturing. It is an effort to build alliances, to persuade potential enemies that you are non threatening, and potential allies that you will share the loot.
@PRCalDude
What is it you don’t know about? You doubt the Rhodesian Bush War happened? That it was about whites trying to retain power in the face of a majority black population? That the US and UK were on the black/communist side?
The wiki article on Rhodesia is relatively detailed, and there are plenty of cites to chase if you’re interested. There are a number of interesting articles on Wiki. Whites in Africa, for example. One interesting thing about that one is the repetitive “Country X got a majority government, and then all the white people left (for S Africa, often with stays in other countries soon to be decolonized)” Namibia is evidently an exception to this. I suppose I should learn something about it.
That article points up how powerful the multicult is. The white population of S Africa contains and contained many, many refugees from the rest of Africa. It must have been common knowledge among S African whites what majority government meant. Yet the multicult still won. Presumably, S Aftrican whites grasped that they would eventually be bombed and so their situation was hopeless.
It is not clear that they would eventually be bombed, and if they were going to eventually be bombed, would have been a better idea to wait for the bombs.
It looks to me that a majority believed in political correctness, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the direct personal experience of a great many among them. The people who knew the truth were low status, and the people who deceived themselves were high status, so everyone believed the high status people.
“A lot of people are wondering why silver is not going up.”
Pardon?
The price of silver has doubled in the last twelve months. In April, before the exchanges increased margin requirements, the price had increased threefold over the prior twelve months.
The price of silver is up 10x since 2001. Gold 7x.
Silver is a clear double over the last year. Gold about 1.6x.
Other commodities are tanking with the markets. Silver is now following gold up with the safe haven trade.
Gold and silver were both money, and I strongly suspect both will be treated as money again when the dollar collapses.
I stand corrected.
@Bill,
It appears that the Bush War was a bit more complicated than simply Rhodesian reactionaries vs. black terrorists aided and comforted by the US/Britain. I think the blacks also had the help of China and Russia. Also, blacks were fighting on the side of the whites in Rhodesia also, presumably b/c they knew where their bread was buttered.
I guess it matters little what actaully happened since, like I said, it’s almost as if Rhodesia never existed now.
The only thing left to happen is for the US and UK governments to start outright bombing US/UK whites from the sky. Whites appear set to disappear like some of the great peoples from antiquity like the Hittites, Assyrians, etc.
@Jim on Sept. 5th.
The situation sounds the same then for whites in Africa as it does now for whites in this country. Part of the reason no one believes low-status whites telling the truth is that low status whites typically cause so many of their own problems that no one believes them when they say they have a real problem (ie, population replacement). I have friends of low status who always talk about the Mexican problem but who also refuse to work and better themselves. There are many pathologies with whites on the low end of the social ladder.
I guess there’s nothing to do but ride the rollercoaster to the bottom. Weeeeeeeee!