The future for any kind of trade will be the blackmarket. Just as in Soviet Russia. And I suppose that's all about contacts. Either that or become a priest. They can starve your precious metals out of you. It's been done before in history.
how confussing, Cash is King/ Cash is Trash, AUD/USD up, down ! it's like trying to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think.............. I need a panadol :/
Good thing I didn't buy silver at that price. Here's another thought: So you decided to hoard your $50 note in 2008 - well in 2010 you'd need $52.30 to retain the same purchasing power. http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualDecimal.html 1 ounce of silver in 2008 was about $AU15 on average. It is now $AU32. So you decided to hoard your $50 note in 1995 - well in 2010 you'd need $73.92 to retain the same purchasing power. 1 ounce of silver in 1995 was about $5. It is now (see above)
Stack Vodka! Dimitry Orlov In 2006 Orlov published an online manifesto, "The New Age of Sail." In 2007 he and his wife sold their apartment in Boston and bought a sailboat, fitted with solar panels and six months supply of propane, and capable of storing a large quantity of food stuffs. He calls it a "survival capsule." He uses a bicycle for transportation. Having bartered vodka for necessities during one of his trips to the post-collapse Russia, he says "When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money." [7] Orlov gives practical advice, like when to start accumulating goods for barter purposes and the need to buy goods that would sustain local communities - "hand tools, simple medications (and morphine), guns and ammo, sharpening stones, bicycles (and lots of tires with patch kits), etc." Orlov writes: "Much of the transformation is psychological and involves letting go of many notions that we have been conditioned to accept unquestioningly. In order to adapt, you will need plenty of free time. Granting yourself this time requires a leap of faith: you have to assume the future has already arrived." He also advises: "Beyond the matter of personal safety, you will need to understand who has what you need and how to get it from them."[12] In a 2009 article in Mother Jones Virginia Heffernan labels Orlov's position as "collapsitarianism" which she believes involves "a desire for complete economic meltdown" and writes that Orlov espouses "bourgeois survivalism."[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov
I can see the wisdom holding a bit of cash aside for emergencies and the unknown just as I can see the sense of investing in PMs. I don't necessarily see the wisdom of waiting for the upcoming GFC2, and the expected drop in all asset classes, commodities ect. As far as I can see they are all priced in USD and the commodity based AUD will tank with everything else.
That's a good point. Unfortunately China satisfies your one criteria and with a government that does not need to worry about staying in power by popular vote it can do pretty much what it wants unlike the Europeans. Printing more money risks a popular revolt when the majority of Chinese are still on slave labour wages.
I'm with you. Cash is king at the moment. I'm holding PM's but they're costing me nothing having taken enough profit to get my initial investment back. I can't lose on them and that's the way I like it at the moment. That's not to say that I'll be staying on the sidelines forever. C
As someone commented on another thread, for us foreigners PMs are still a good hedge against the US dollar. Gold might have dropped from US$1,907.88 to $1,681.74 currently, but in New Zealand dollars it's currently only $30 off its all-time high. I imagine it's a similar story in AU$?
An economic reformation cannot come before a monetary reformation. And a monetary reformation cannot come while money is backed by nothing but government debt. Merkel cannot change that.
25 November UK Banks Brace for Eurozone Break-Up; Eurogeddon and the Death of a Currency What they are preparing for is the biggest mass default in history. There's no orderly way of doing this. European finance and trade is too far integrated to allow for an easy unwinding of contracts. It's going to be anarchy. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/11/uk-banks-brace-for-eurozone-break-up.html
Yeh mish runs a good blog, i read his stuff often. this article is pretty good too...people should post a combination of his stuff plus zerohedges ...
Opposite can also be true, maybe not for the long term but definitely in short. I hoard my $50 from May this year. You bought one ounce of silver in May and decided to hold it. My $50 is now worth $50. Your one ounce of silver is worth - well see your quote above. That is a loss of nearly 40% Just my 2 cents worth but I think playing any investment game there are two essentials:- 1) Don't put all your eggs in the one basket. 2) Hedging is insurance against loss (not always though). Finally, always be emotionally prepared that all investments could head south very very quickly!! Mick
I used to hate having the AUD erode all the nominal gains in the PMs when they rose against the USD. But I've come to the same conclusion as you. When risk is off in international trade, the Australian market starts tanking, the AUD falls and PMs appreciate in relative terms. When risk is on, Australian markets rise, the AUD appreciates and PMs fall in relative terms. We saw this in 08 when risk was off, the flight to USD sunk both the PMs and the AUD. This protected the value of PMs in AUD terms. The difference this time is the USD will not be the safe place it was in 08. So if money crowds into PMs this time we will likely get a double whammy, with the AUD sinking in relative terms WHILE PMs rise in absolute terms around the world. Still, it will be a tragedy of historic proportions.
....and the saga continues http://www.acting-man.com/?p=11952 Update on US Banks and the Euro Area Things Look Grim Today the world's new Zombie Bank center is no longer Tokyo, but New York US banks hold some $520 billion in derivatives exposure related to Europe. 'Investors start to notice that Germany is part of the euro zone'. 'Germany's Finances are Not as Sound as Believed'. Evidently, the 'print or die' meme is also continuing to spread.
http://www.arabianmoney.net/banking...nks-go-bust-and-economies-contract-then-what/ Bailouts are over: debtors will fail, banks go bust and economies contract, then what? Try to standback and take the position of the guys emerging from the isolation of the Mars 500 Project. Instead of looking at day-to-day market fluctuations look at the bigger picture. It takes a while to focus but actually you can then see where we have come from since the 2007 crisis and where we are most likely going. The global response to the 2007 and much more severe 2008-9 crises was to bail everybody out. The banks were too big to fail and so every debtor deserved support. It's madness really and some home-owners have never been better off with interest rates so low and enterprises with very poor internal economics have staggered on regardless. The Endgame All that is about to end as global interest rates rise in a bond market crash. That is what the gradual blowing up of interest rates in Europe and the contagion that has now reached Germany tells you. Those who have relied upon low interest rates to stay afloat with big debts are therefore about to get their comeuppance. On the otherside of this trade if you are a creditor with a weak balance sheet then you will be dragged under too by these debts going bad. Banks in the eurozone look particularly vulnerable but as the contagion spreads around the world this will be true for banks all over the globe. It is a global banking trauma of a kind we have not seen before, or at least not since the 1930s when something very similar did happen. Credit will freeze up for two reasons: the banks capital will be under severe pressure and interest rates will be much higher. Without credit the flow of trade and business will decline and economies will contract. How bad will it get? One thing is for sure, there will be an end to the crisis. The Great Depression of the 1930s eventually corrected and then came the Second World War. This is a downward spiral and there will not be an equal sharing of the burden this time. Winner takes all The spoils will go to the cash-rich and credit-worthy who will buy up the cheap assets from the bankrupt, and that will restart the economic cycle, although it may take some time to get moving again. Eventually interest rates will fall back as the demand for money will be low. Hopefully the authorities will at this point put measures in place to ensure that borrowing can never again be allowed to spiral so out-of-control. Most likely every central banker in the world will have lost his job by then. Then the bounce back will actually be stronger and faster than most people think possible now and a new age of peace and prosperity should dawn. Well why should there be another major war when there are no obvious opponents or at least none that are remotely equally matched?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...ontagion-spreads/story-e6frg9lx-1226206567365 Fear of new financial crisis grows as European contagion spreads THE tentacles of Europe's debt crisis are clutching at the heart of the Australian economy with global credit markets frozen in a "Lehman-style way", triggering warnings from the nation's most senior bankers that a new financial crisis is upon us. "This is fundamentally a European problem and the issue is there is a contagion," ANZ chief executive Mike Smith said yesterday. "There is a credit crunch in Europe now, it is spreading to Asia and it will spread here too." "It will not be like last time where the guarantees flowed from country to country and eventually that helped; the line was drawn in the sand. "This time time there is no confidence that a sovereign guarantee would would make any difference and that would only exacerbate the problem."
