Check this out, Alan Greenspan the godfather of the fiat ponzi scheme writing in 1966, 20 yrs before he took control of the Fed talking about the importance of the gold standard. Funny how power & fiat money changes your beliefs. I read an article that he know again believes in gold in the monetary system. What a turnaround! http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html
Thanks for the interesting reading people , all the links are a great help to me. I have just had my cherry popped so far as Stacking go's , I had planned on trying to get an Oz of Silver a week starting two weeks back, I'm up to five so far..... Do I need to talk to someone about this compulsion??? As a newbie to all this and I really do mean a newbie in the truest sense, I cant see any fall in the price being sustainable at all. As a few here have mentioned my gut is telling me to buy, buy, buy. And the more and the deeper I research the stronger I trust my gut, especially so on Silver , (not that I can afford gold as investment anyways). Things such as this Gold is down 6% and silver 12% since the start of 2011. This is the sharpest decline in precious metals since June of last year and with technical support broken at the 50-day moving averages, many are concerned of a deeper correction ahead. While there are a myriad of factors driving the prices, two of the major opposing forces are Chinese demand for physical gold on the long side and JPMorgan paper schemes on the short side. Which force prevails in the short term remains to be seen, but in the long run the paper shorts will eventually be squeezed, pushing the price for both gold and silver much higher. SNIP While the paper market has been driving the spot price lower, the physical market appears to be as robust as ever. Sales of silver eagle coins for the month of January have already set a new all-time record, with ten days still left in the month. Furthermore, silver demand in China has quadrupled versus last year, as the emerging Chinese middle class looks for a hedge against inflation and the Chinese government encourages its citizens to buy gold and silver. This is a relatively new phenomenon in Chinese culture, as ownership of precious metals was illegal just a few short years back. But this has all changed as China has become the largest producer of gold in the world and is expected to surpass India as the largest consumer of gold as well. http://www.commodityonline.com/news/China-vs-JPMorgan-the-battle-over-gold-and-silver-35898-3-1.html I only have a very limited understanding of the big picture in all this, but it would seem that the yen for physical PM's from the Yen and others will only drive prices ever higher while at the same time the smoke is starting to smell and the mirror's are developing major cracks with the paper pushers.
And that's one of few reasons, why I'm into PM's. Another interesting thing, is that China recently opened few bank branches in NY (manhattan chinatown) with purpose of: - http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/12/news/international/yuan_china/index.htm So will PM's crash in 2011? Maybe, I would actually love for history to repeat itself and silver go down in same way as of late 2008. (around today's $18 - 20) Why? So I could stack more
I hear you and wonder the same from someone who initial thoughts were buying one sovereign and a couple of oz of silver a month. Spent 1.5K in a week buying silver and gold. hmm think going to have revisit my budget. But seriously the way I am looking at it is that my A$ can also tank to the US$ just as PM's can. And who's to say that US$ is the standard if they keep diluting it's worth. In my mind I just bought some stateless currency that is hopefully inflation proof. But hey what does this newbie know.
$100 in fiat terms. Its the VALUE of PM that is important not the price. If the wealth transfer moves to a new currency, it will be due to hyper-inflation and the failure of the old currency. So your gold might have moved from $1400 to $10,000 in the old currency and transfer to $100 in the new currency but the value would have remained the same. On the contrary if you saved the $1400 in the old currency and didn't purchase an asset, when the wealth transfer starts that money will only be worth $14 in the new currency.
The market manipulators are attempting to stop the stockmarket from crashing. It's not really going to work. The divergences we saw last week are only further proof that it will never work when push comes to shove. I believe, as well as a few other contrarians, that they are attempting to shake out the bears, to get rid of them, one way or another, to convince them that the market is just going to keep going up. They tried to do this in 2007. Market peaked in November 2007, and for the first half of 2008 the market just never managed to get back to it's November 2007 high. Then the market plummeted SPECTACULARLY in the second half of 2008. I can see some manipulation going on for most of 2011, a 99% chance of a massive crash in 2012 that will thereafter slowly bleed out, which carry through into 2013 where it will reach it's bottom. The shorts are getting shaken out, all but the strongest bears are giving up. The strongest bears are hanging on. I happen to be one of these bears. Nobody is going to fool me that the markets are just going to keep skyrocketing. It's virtually impossible, for example, for the S&P to ever reach 1500 again, or the Dow to ever reach 14,000 again. It's just impossible, and Goldman, JP Morgan, Citi, etc all know damn well that we're never going to take out those tops again. So...they're playing it like a fool's errand. They are making the weaker bears believe that the market will once again retest those highs (which these weaker bears believe would wipe them out, whether that is a real or perceived threat) but the strongest bears, like myself and a few others I know personally, are just NOT buying the bullshit. While I believe precious metals will see another major leg up, that is not going to happen for at least another 2 years or so. It's a fair way off. In the meantime there will be nasty volatility on BOTH stockmarkets AND commodities. Make no mistake about it. That's what happened in 2007-2009 - lots of volatility, but ultimately the upswings were all for nought - as BOTH stockmarkets AND commodities PLUMMETED - even in the mistaken belief that it was "just a dip" toward the end of July 2008 - that "dip" turned into the mother of all corrections. Don't think it can't happen again. It is happening already, but most here cannot see or understand that markets are not always driven by fundamentals, but rather by psychology and social mood. When social mood turns sour, as it is beginning to do, then no amount of rational market analysis is going to stop a massive sell-off and liquidation. A "flight to safety" once in motion can never be reversed. The FOMC couldn't do it in October 2008, and they won't be doing it now, either.
Emotion - how true: Note Peter Thomas. Note Goldman Sachs. Now for some Top Financial Firms Gold Price Predictions for 2011: The 2011 gold price comments below have been condensed and edited. Thomas Winmill, president of Midas Funds "Gold prices could average $1,500 per ounce next year and $1,600 by year-end in 2011." Goldman Sachs "With the current round of [quantitative easing] set to end in June, and our U.S. economics team now forecasting strong growth in 2011 and 2012, we expect U.S. real interest rates to begin to rise in 2011, likely causing gold prices to peak near $1,750/oz in 2012," it said in a recent report." Peter Thomas, director of business development at PFG Precious Metals "Don't rule out the chance of a price pull back in early January simply on profit-taking once traders are back at their desks. There's been absolutely no resistance," because of the light trading volumes common around this time." BNP Paribas precious-metals analyst Anne-Laure Tremblay "Gold's perceived property as an inflation hedge is making the metal an attractive investment in the country, particularly as the other popular inflation hedge, property investment, has already achieved stellar price increases in the past two years," says who recently raised her 2011 forecast to an average of $1,500 an ounce, from $1,245." BMO Capital Markets "The greatest threats to gold in the year ahead would be a premature increase in interest rates by the Fed, rapidly reduced inflation fears and a selloff of exchange-traded-fund holdings in favor of speculative short positions." U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. " Expects gold prices to climb to $1,690 an ounce, and potentially even higher, over the next 12 months as a new round of quantitative easing keeps real interest rates low and drives excess capital flows from countries with trade surpluseswhich have traditionally parked their money in U.S. government bondsinto other investable assets, such as gold." Sheryl King, head of Canadian economics at Merrill Lynch "In this world of risk aversion and concerns about the U.S. currency, gold is where you want to be, regardless of whether you think the global economy will go back into recession, with a wave of defaults, or massive inflation. As long as we have these expectations of where the global economy's going to go, there's a lot of upside for gold. "Our analyst is thinking we'll get a spike to up to as much as $100 a barrel [for oil] at some point in 2011. Base metals will benefit from the fact that global growth remains strong, and emerging Asia is particularly strong. We see commodities up about 8 per cent this year. " http://www.california-gold-rush-miner.us/gold-price-predictions-article.htm
