I read a lot of strange things from Republican state party platforms but I’ve never seen the crazy gold stuff get this kind of official recognition before (from the Idaho Republican party platform):
– An admonishment for residents to stock up on gold and silver to gird against the ravages of U.S. dollar inflation, should it come to that.
Does this have legs (beyond Beck and Paul)? Is there any chance someone at Slate or Kaplan will write the first “liberal economists say hoarding gold and silver is a poor financial decision but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords…”?
4tehlulz
BIMETALLISM NOW, BIMETALLISM TOMORROW, BIMETALLISM FOREVER
Chad S
Its really just Paultard nonsense. All based on the premise that since currency is openly traded around the world, we lose some of our sovereignty by giving foreigners the ability to change the value of our money.
When you point out that gold, silver, etc is also openly traded around the world also, the most intelligent responses you’re bound to get usually involve accusations of treason/fascism.
dmsilev
Has any state GOP come out against fluoridation yet? It’s only a matter of time before Republicans are on TV railing about the International Islamofascist Conspiracy to Sap and Impurify Our Precious Bodily Fluids.
dms
Cacti
Idaho is pretty much Central HQ for the white separatist loons.
Mark S.
What does that even mean?
Tonal Crow
Investing in gold is not “crazy”. It is a hedge against uncertainty, flight from currencies, and inflation. Actually taking physical possession of significant quantities of precious metals is, however, usually unnecessary (except in doomsday scenarios) and incurs other risks (e.g., theft).
dmsilev
@Mark S.: Beat me to it. I guess it’s a ban on C-section babies getting married.
dms
S. cerevisiae
I would recommend stocking up on cigarettes and cheap whiskey rather than gold and silver.
Violet
@Mark S.:
No transsexuals. And a dogwhistle to birthers and send-the-immigrants-home freaks.
wmd
Gold has been performing well in the past decade – it is up 400% since about 2000. Other assets haven’t really moved over the same time span.
Not to say this will continue.
Lew Rockwell, von Mises, a whole slew of “contrarian” newsletter writers all promote gold and silver ownership. The inflation of the money supply is usually given as a reason – more dollars chasing the same quantity of goods means prices must rise.
I’m not convinced.
strandedvandal
@Cacti:
Lifelong Idahoan here. You’re rash generalization is wrong. Maybe 10-20 years ago, during the Richard Butler days it would have been accurate.
bkny
@S. cerevisiae:
that i think would be a more valuable currency than gold and silver to wingnuts/teatards.
Violet
@wmd:
Since everyone is saying buy gold, now is probably the time to sell.
licensed to kill time
Jeez, I just read the rest of their new platform. It sounds like a set-up for secession. They really are loony.
Yeah, it’s that blackity black thing again.
Warren Terra
Eh, in 1988 (the year the state caucuses made it the only state to go for Pat Robertson), the Washington State Republican Platform denounced witchcraft and yoga.
That one stuck in my mind, but I’ve seen lots of other examples of state Republican platforms that are not merely extreme but wildly nutty. Thing is, the platform and some other meaningless venues were intended to be a way for the party to capture the energy and affection of the loonies without actually having to respond in any substantive way to their insanities – more of Tom Franks’s “What’s The Matter With Kansas”, only with even less meaning than the Republicans’ usual empty pious sanctimonies. But what we’re seeing now is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.
As one case in point, Ken Silverstein has a great piece in this month’s Harpers about what’s happened to Arizona as the Republicans have spent the last couple decades getting further and further from reality (it isn’t web accessible unless you subscribe to the magazine, making this link not especially useful).
EconWatcher
Mark S.:
Sounds like what they mean is that if U.S. citizens marry non-U.S. spouses, then the spouses should no longer get citzenship. Which I guess means that they would like to deport my wife and mother of my kids.
I would like to meet these people in person so that I can adequately express my disagreement.
strandedvandal
@EconWatcher:
Yeah, it’s not as cathartic as you might think. Hagedorn, mentioned in 14, lives down the road from me. He’s a frigging asshole of the highest order. He doesn’t care what you or I think, because we are not wing nut Republicans. It’s really that simple for them.
amorphous
@strandedvandal: I do believe that one organizations (Aryan Nation?) has moved its HQ to Eastern Oregon, which is kind of like Idaho, just it happens to be in the same state as the People’s Republic of PDX.
Punchy
You have to learn the crazy from the professionals.
I give you a gubenatorial candidate for Kansas….for TTLTR, here’s some gems:
Heard her on the radio today. Bat.Shit.Insane.
MikeJ
@wmd:
What if you had bought in 1980 and sold in 1990?
Sentient Puddle
@wmd:
Yeah, that reasoning is pretty bunk. “Same quantity of goods” is a pretty dumb assumption.
And even assuming that, factor in population growth. More people with the same number of dollars in the economy is deflationary. Which is very not good.
Bubblegum Tate
@dmsilev:
Just Sharron Angle thus far, but it’ll happen sooner or later.
I did a decent bit of flying last week, and this interesting feature package was part of my airplane reading. I didn’t realize just how far back the wingnut fixation with gold went.
Warren Terra
@Tonal Crow:
I have no idea whether investing in gold bullion makes sense, but Mother Jones had a great article about how there’s an entire industry that makes its money scaring people into buying gold as a hedge against inflation, then pulling the switch and instead selling them wildly overpriced gold coins as “rare collectibles”. Glenn Beck and essentially the entire talk radio industry are, of course, heavily involved.
Resident Firebagger
@Tonal Crow:
Good answer. I would add that around 2003, silver was $4 an ounce. Today it’s in the range of $18.50. I doubt anyone’s 401K is doing that well.
Precious metals is actually an interesting area. Like with any type of investment, you need to do your own due diligence, and even then it’s easy to make missteps (believe me, I have). But once you filter out the Paultards and assorted other crazies and consider the inherent fraudulence of Wall Street, precious metals looks better all the time…
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@S. cerevisiae:
Conservatives I know recommend investing in guns and ammo. They will be the first to loot when the government falls.
kdaug
Gold is at nearly double the price over the last five years. What part of “buy low, sell high” don’t these people get?
Nevermind, I know. It’s a good racket to be in – hoard gold when it’s cheap, sell it back when it’s expensive – but the constant shilling against the economy to drive up prices is really annoying.
Although I do like the subterranean bomb shelters…
MikeJ
@dmsilev:
There was a lawsuit in Tacoma in 2004. And there’s a web site noforcedfluoride.org run by people in Bellingham.
Amazing how many loons are still around.
Scott
I know a gold ranter on Facebook, and I always kinda want to ask him how on earth he’s going to use that gold once society collapses. He can’t take it into the grocery store to get food — they wouldn’t have any way to weigh it or determine its value, and they be able to make change for anything you managed to buy.
Besides, once word got out that you were lugging gold into grocery stores, you’d get your home broken into fast, and all your precious gold would be gone.
Gold ranters just don’t think.
some other guy
Yes, buy lots of gold when its currently priced at an all-time high. Instead of “buy low, sell high” we’ll “buy high, (hopefully) sell higher.” Brilliant!
Ask all those real estate investors how that’s working out for them.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Punchy:
My neighbor is a gay man married to another gay man. I love my neighbor as I love myself. Am I gay yet? When do I get to be governor?
Allan
Anything in there about protecting our precious bodily fluids?
Resident Firebagger
@Warren Terra:
See my comment above. Gold sellers that advertise on Beck are flat out gouging his paranoid and gullible viewers, no question. But that doesn’t make precious metals a bad investment — you just need to know where to look. Because of Beck’s rubes, an outfit like Goldline can sell gold and silver coins at double what they’re worth.
While there are other reputable national dealers out there, honestly, about the best place to buy precious metals is eBay…
strandedvandal
@amorphous:
Yeah, Oregon, Montana, Texas. They’ve spread out a lot.
Dork
What’s funny is that gold as a metal has so little practical value anyways besides ornamentation. Not many airplanes, cars, and dodgeball courts are made out of gold.
wmd
@Violet:
Gold isn’t a main stream investment. There is a bit of hype at present, and the daily multipage ads offering to buy gold/silver indicate something – I’d say more that people are hurting financially and selling whatever they can.
When you see Jim Cramer promoting mining stock that’s the time to sell.
amorphous
@Punchy: So DougJ is spoofing the KS Gubernatorial elections now?
I hope.
El Cid
Also, THERE IS NO GOD-DAMN FUCKING INFLATION AND NO ONE IS SERIOUSLY PREDICTING ANY you fucking god-damned infantile bastards.
wmd
@MikeJ:
You would have lost a lot of money.
what’s your point? Gold went from $850 to $260 over 20 years. It’s gone from $260 to $1240 in about 10 years.
I wouldn’t be surprised by $400 or $3000 gold in the coming decade.
SpotWeld
Okay… so all this stupid focused on the panic buying a gold and silver…
Is it a bubble yet??
beltane
@Mark S.: Only the product of unmedicated home births will be allowed to marry. Those of us whose parents were not survivalists or hippies will be out of luck.
MikeJ
@Dork: They all require it. Great in electronic circuits.
Except the dodgeball courts.
Zifnab
@wmd:
And housing is doing fantastic if you only check price between 1998 and 2007. That doesn’t explain why gold should be outperforming or if these sky high values have any basis in reality.
I am curious to see what happens if the price of gold tanks. Given that other commodities like oil and steel have been middling at best, one questions what the magical value-maintaining quality of gold happens to be.
Either way, if I remember my 1800s US History, the guys championing the gold standard were the banks and other money lenders. A gold standard held down inflation – in some cases it could help push deflation. This made the dollars you lent just as valuable as the dollars you were paid back.
Not so great for the farmers and small business owners who had to go into debt to start up their businesses, though. They suffered under a stagnant economy, struggling to grow their businesses at a higher rate than their interest payments.
Hell, the pre-Civil War populist Democrats cut their teeth on the gold-standard debate. This fight has deep, deep roots. It’s just incredibly ironic that you’ve got farmers and small business people in Idaho CHAMPIONING an economic idea that their great grandparents fought against, tooth and nail.
stibbert
@Warren Terra: 2nd your link to those MoJo articles, WT. They describe how investing in bullion involves a markup of ~5%, exclusive of transport/insurance/storage costs. But sales-ilk from firms like Goldline will typically bait’n’switch you into buying gold coins, at 30% markup. NTM that both the bullion and coin markets are essentially un-regulated, & the firms & their sales-ilk are not licensed as investment advisors, they’re just wanting to scam on the fears of the ill-informed.
ogb
The end-of-the-world gold-hoarder crowd is the absolute looniest of all the loons. And I say this as someone who buys and sells gold/silver to them all day, everyday.
If I had a nickel for every conspiracy theory I’ve heard since I got into the trade 5 years ago, I’d have a lot of (gold) nickels. Black helicopters, Obama work-camps, Jews running the world, etc., are just the starting point, a known set of “facts”, from which other, more nuanced conspiracies spring.
But their extreme paranoia is good for business, so I smile and nod; and for the really crazy ones, I charge a little extra and make a lump sum donation once a year to the ACLU or Organizing for America.
kdaug
@Dork: Bingo. Gold has next-to-no industrial value.
If these folks (the purchasers) were smart, they’d be buying iridium by the crate full.
El Cid
Gold [is] my shepherd; I shall not want.
Gold maketh me to lie down in green pastures: it leadeth me beside the still waters.
Gold restoreth my soul: it leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Gold [art] with me; thy coin and thy ingot they comfort me.
Gopld preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with plating; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of Gold for ever.
cyntax
@Dork:
You’re using a computer and a cell phone right? It’s pretty indispensible to most electronics. Just sayin.
leinie
They haven’t actually voted that platform into being yet – happens this weekend. Here’s hoping the more rational ones knock down some of this shit.
What’s happened is the teatards and Palinites have taken over, and they are the ones who are sending delegates to the committee meetings. Which is how we get this shit. You wanna see some crazy, check out the primary candidates for Governor that Butch Otter had to deal with – and I have NO LOVE for Butch.
They rejected the proposal to outlaw public schools, but they’re good on the getting rid of the 17th amendment- don’t want direct election of Senators. They’re also calling for a candidate who won his primary to STEP DOWN because he’s been known to work with Democrats. Don’t care what they voters expressed, he shouldn’t be running as a Republican. They’re going after Mike Simpson cuz of his votes on financial regs, I think, and he was one of the moron Congressmen standing on the balcony waiving signs during the HCR debates. Nobody can be pure enough for them.
The stoopid here, it really, really burns. They pride themselves on it.
MikeJ
@wmd: There’s no reason to think that today’s prices aren’t exactly like the bubble from 1980.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with buying gold. Buying stuff that other people want is part of the way you make money. The other part is buying it cheap and selling it dear, not waiting until the price has run up and then potentially getting stuck with it.
Yes, you might be able to get out of it before the rubes catch on. A lot of people knew the real estate bubble was a bubble, but wanted to cash in and get out before disaster struck. Some of them even got away with it.
kdaug
@MikeJ: Contacts, yes. But that’s such a minuscule amount. IFAIK, no one’s scraping the gold off their video cards to try to sell it.
Calouste
@Warren Terra:
Well, the Washington State Republican Party has its base in
Western IdahoEastern Washington, to that explains things.Ruckus
@some other guy:
Had a friend whose motto was
“Buy high, sell low, at least that’s how it always seems to work out”
El Cid
@kdaug: People are stealing copper, steal, and iron though! What if we made currency out of copper or nickel! Imagine that!
Hugin & Munin
El Cid: Watch out for inflation, you say? Will do.
beltane
@ogb: I have the feeling these small time gold investors get ripped off a both ends of the transaction. If the shit ever hit the fan, the local powers that be could induce them to part with all their gold for a loaf of bread because in times of crisis, food is more valuable than gold.
trollhattan
Should hoard food instead. Can do so without a storage facility, thusly.
http://www.ifoce.com/records.php
America, f*#k yeah! (Also, too, ditto on Idaho being a fount of RW krazy, lovingly blended with Mormonism in the southeast bit.)
El Cid
@Hugin & Munin: Exactly. The biggest threat our nation faces right now is all the inflation, because of the deficit, despite critics pointing out that there is no inflation, and no one’s predicting any, because, basically, shut up.
Dork
@cyntax: Yeah, perhaps in minute quantities. But when some clown wants to pay for my crops (real intrinsic value) with 2 gold coins, chances are I’m not turning those things into cell phones.
My point isn’t that they’re not used; it’s that they’re not used in quantities large enough for a cell phone company or Boeing to buy my chunk of gold off me in exchange for an iPhone or flight to Phoenix.
Kryptik
I dunno why the big deal about gold. After all, GOP folks like Boehner and Shelby have basically just said that the financial crisis was insignificant like an ant, don’cha know.
Tonal Crow
@Warren Terra: Though the ethics are open to question, the Schadenfreude level of bait-and-switch scammers cheating wingnuts is awfully high.
Chat Noir
@ogb:
Cool!
LOL
cleek
i hear there’s something big in lithium’s future.
maybe a good time to start investing ?
PurpleGirl
“natural man/woman” = not a transsexual who has had gender reassignment surgery, therefore still able to make babies. Remember — Sole purpose of marriage is to make babies.
jl
Gold might be a good option as a small part of a portfolio if you have room for diversification. Like many commodities, gold prices are subject to long and sustained swings in prices that are difficult to relate closely to the supposed determinants of price that we economists dignify through professional convention by the term ‘economic fundamentals’.
Taking decades as an arbitrary interval, you would have done great buying gold in the early 70s, been wiped out in the 80s and lost some money in the 90s.
Take a look at the 20 year price history at the bottom of the following URL:
http://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
In a just world, Cole would use the gazillions he has made off the BJ blog to set up a gold investment company. We would help market gold ‘inflation and social mayhem’ insurance to the GOP and the Tbaggers. Soon, they would be broke and we would be rich.
I think a gold coin with Tunch on it would sell. Tunch is a fatcat, and has the requisite implacable and distant expression that inspires confidence in the type of person who dives headlong into gold, or stock market gold plays as an economic insurance policy.
QuaintIrene
And don’t forget those Survival Seeds, another product hawked over in Beckistan. You know, shelling out 150 bucks for heirloom seeds you can get a lot cheaper from a dozen or more garden catalogs. Seeds that you can save against a possible dystopian future, but unfortunately will be unviable after 5-7 years, even under perfect storage conditions.
Zifnab
@cleek: I expect a return in six weeks, maybe six months. Certainly no later than a year.
Sheila
Do the alchemists in Idaho plan on turning silver and gold into bread once the famine strikes?
lou
Ever heard of the Hunt Brothers? They could tell you something about silver prices and speculation.
Also, if you looked at my 401K between 1992 and 2002 and if it had kept up that trend til now, I’d be a millionaire in Tahiti right now.
Instead it’s in the dumps. Everything is cyclical — including precious metals.
kdaug
@jl: OK, that’s kinda rude. Hilarious, but rude.
Respect your Tunchian overlords!
cyntax
@Dork:
Like most things that depends on the size of the chunk in question. These guys are making a business of salvaging the gold from old electronics [via NPR].
trollhattan
@jl:
I, for one, would like a gold coin that weighs as much as Tunch. Nomsayin’?
ogb
@beltane: Yes, they get screwed both ways. A gold coin right now carries a premium of near 4% over spot gold (and that’s if you buy from a reputable coin dealer – NOT Goldline or the like), but it sells at around or under spot. That’s 4+% just pissed away.
My business is refining precious metals, so I’m more on the back end of the whole deal – i.e. we recycle scrap gold into pure gold which then gets minted later.
But personally I hold very little gold – it pays no interest and it’s at an all time high. It seems like the worst possible gamble to me – I am going to sacrifice the money I have now to own something which might or (more likely) might not help me in the case of global economic collapse. Let me say this – If the shit falls apart the way the end-of-the-worlders think it will, it’s gonna take a lot more than 20 gold coins to sustain for any significant period of time.
But I don’t tell them I think that.
Warren Terra
@Calouste:
Sure, helps to explain things – but not to justify them. After all, Eastern Washington is what, a quarter of the state? In theory, the Republicans in the Western half have the numbers to outvote the Easterners – but they don’t have the energy.
And even so, the supposedly saner Republicans of Western Washington aren’t exactly committed to defending reality. I learned my most important lessons about the Republican party from watching the 1996 Washington Governor’s race. From a field split a half-dozen ways, a solid Evangelical base was easily enough to nominate one Ellen Craswell, a member of the Christian Identity movement and a certified loon. She became a fervent evangelical when her husband saw a vision of a forty-foot tall Jesus by the side of the road and when God cured her cancer (it came back a few years later, and killed her; bad God!). She ran on a campaign promise to have an administration composed solely of wise and godly people – and when called on this, asserted that they’d have to be wise or godly, but not necessarily both. She promised to cut taxes by a third without affecting either law enforcement or education – which, interestingly, are two-thirds of the state budget. She proposed to sell the state’s premier university (at least at the time, the most successful public research university in the country as measured by grants awarded) but had no idea who would buy it or for how much. This obviously certifiable nutball, someone who clearly shouldn’t be allowed to handle sharp implements, let alone run a state, got the endorsement of the theoretically business-minded and calculatingly rational state Chamber of Commerce and got 42% of the vote, i.e. got the vote of essentially every voter in the state with Republican partisan tendencies. That race taught me everything I needed to know about the Republicans.
MikeJ
Now is the time to buy silver. I saw this documentary on HBO about how Louisiana is being overrun with werewolves. Thank god that Sookie woman is doing something about it.
EJ
The really annoying thing about these people is there are enough of them that investing in gold might actually be a good idea, so long as you sell at the right time.
Zifnab
@El Cid: Well, that’s the joke. The government, over the last two years, has dumped hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars into the economy. We’re running a $2.3 trillion deficit. That should mean something, economically.
But all the money is getting scooped up by the wealthy Washington insiders. Military contractors, banks, car company CEOs, and folks who should be paying a higher ATM, all get huge cash infusions. But that money refuses to trickle down. It just gets horded. So the money stagnates and the economy with it.
Had Bush and Obama plowed fortunes entirely into welfare and social security and unemployment and food stamps and construction projects and government employee wages, I think we would be seeing more robust growth, perhaps even a risk of inflation as demand eclipsed supply.
But when you hand the guy who has everything another $10k tax cut… what is he going to spend it on? Nothing. He’s just going to put it in his pile so he can get a higher score.
Resident Firebagger
I guess I’ve gotten into precious metals because I don’t see anything else to get into. A generation ago, people had pensions. All gone. Then we had 401Ks. Wall Street has siphoned those away over the past decade or so. Seriously, what else is there?
It is true that the big flaw in the argument of “goldbugs” is that they see precious metals is a hedge against inflation — even though inflation is non-existent at this point. But even beyond that, silver does have industrial application, and, compared to gold, is in fairly short supply.
The other thing you’ll hear is that, no matter how FUBAR things get, gold and silver will always be worth something, because people have valued gold and silver for like 5,000 years. This is somewhat reassuring, if for no other reason than it means a few of these folks are actually acknowledging that the world is at least 5,000 years old.
I think it will be at least another couple of years till the precious metals “bubble” is ready to burst. Right now it’s just on the fringe of mainstream discourse. When you start hearing for-real MSM outlets and Cramer-like court jesters telling you that everyone is buying gold and silver and you simply must get in on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that of course will be the time to sell and run for cover.
maus
@wmd:
Tulips and .coms forever.
@MikeJ: I can deal with the Alex Jones crowd in WA better than I can teabaggers.
Brachiator
There’s an obvious future thread title here: At Your Beck and Paul.
The call to stock up on gold and silver is certainly great for the people who sell various metals products (and a lot of these people probably used to be mortgage brokers). If we ever had the great “Let’s Go Galt” collapse, for example, how are people supposed to get to their gold? How would they store it? How would they do any gold based transactions?
But just as an investment, gold and silver are still dodgy bets. I couldn’t see it as making up a large part of any one’s portfolio. You would have to look at the future value of gold not just against the dollar, but also against other currencies (what if the dollar collapsed altogether and the price of gold was now pegged against the euro?).
Beck and Paul are stuck in a 19th century economic world view that is totally irrelevant to … well, to anything.
Sentient Puddle
@Resident Firebagger:
The hell? How is it that gold is priced so much higher then? Is it a matter of perception?
Honest question here because that makes no sense. It goes against all laws of sense.
Resident Firebagger
@lou: Yes, I’ve heard of the Hunts. I was also around in 2008 when the price of silver dropped from $21.20 to under $9. It’s a volatile market and always has been. My only regret was that I didn’t buy more when it was $9.
I just don’t think people should dismiss precious metals because teabaggers talk about it. These are weird times, and they’re going to get weirder…
maus
@Warren Terra:
Do they even? Seattle is pretty damn densely populated and politically active. At least the software crowd is fairly progressive, or at least small-l libertarian.
@QuaintIrene:
From what I’ve read of reviews, those survival seeds are poorly packed and will be useless after a year or two.
BombIranForChrist
My guess is that people who want this in the platform already have a large position in gold and would profit from a substantial influx of new investors.
As far as the value of gold goes, it is up, but adjusted for inflation, it is nowhere near its peak, reached somewhere in the 1970’s, I believe.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Warren Terra:
I smell another rotating thread heading.
Somewhere I hear the wise and foolish virgins giggling.
Roger Moore
@Tonal Crow:
Buying some gold isn’t crazy, but “investing” a substantial fraction of your portfolio in gold is. Buying commodities in general is a hedge against inflation, but the market for gold isn’t rational. There are enough people who see it as the one true form of money and the only safe place to put their investments in times of crisis that its price tends to spiral out of relation to economic fundamentals. If you’re really worried about inflation, you’re much better off investing in more mundane commodities, or in stocks in market segments that are likely to do better than average if inflation goes up.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Well, that’s me on the boat home then.
However, my tackle is what I was born with.
Christ, I’m done for. Less than one yoga class a week and I snarl up in an aching ball. Although the sight of women half my age holding poses for minutes that I can’t hold for half a second is so humiliating that even the “lukkitt the nubile women” lecherous part of my brain feels dejected.
Batocchio
The Texas GOP platform used to call for a return to the gold standard, but that’s not in the most recent one. Now they just want to outlaw both anal and oral sex, teach creationism in school, etc.
Amanda in the South Bay
The natural born thing I think is a dig at us trans people. Cause, you know heterosexual marriage is a bad thing when you have a trans woman marry a guy, whereas same sex marriage is ok when you have a trans woman marry a non trans woman!
Amanda
+2
gwangung
Um. Seconded.
*sigh*
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
It’s even worse than that. I think Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Paul Krugman would sign hosannas of gratitude if there were signs of inflation, because it’d even we’d be hitting against production capacity constraints. Which we are far, far, fucking far from doing.
Inflation would be good fucking news right now. Plus it would gradually devalue the huge fucking mountains of mortgage debt that middle america is struggling with.
Tonal Crow
@Roger Moore: Any investment vehicle can be abused. There is some craziness in the gold market, which does not make it crazy to consider either buying or selling it. As with any other investment vehicle, you need to evaluate risks and benefits, with an eye toward what you can afford to lose. As for how gold compares to other vehicles for inflation hedging, your mileage may vary.
Martin
@jl:
I’d consider any commodity as part of a diversified portfolio, but precious metals have value based in no small part on their preciousness. When gold was more valuable than platinum, in spite of being considerably more common, that should have served as a warning that gold is in a bubble right now. Personally, I’d avoid gold and go with something a little less trendy with a more stable price history. I have a friend who grades gold coins and he doesn’t own any gold other than some specific coins whose value is derived from the scarcity (and grade) of the coin, rather than the gold itself. His company has done a great job of affixing other value (bragging rights, basically) to individual gold holdings which is helping drive the price up not unlike trends with classic cars or artwork (or real-estate) does. Ultimately, some other trendy area emerges and the price plummets.
Brachiator
@Batocchio:
Wouldn’t it be something if they got it exactly reversed and printed the platform as wanting to outlaw creationism and to teach sex in school?
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“The natural born thing I think is a dig at us trans people.”
Yep, although the dog-whistle anti-immigration dig may also be there.
Kudos to the LGBTQ community for not throwing trans people under the bus. I think it would have been easy for lesbians and gays to let youse be the next Socially Acceptable Hate Object. But, from an outsiders view, it seems that there’s still a lot of solidarity in what’s a diverse movement.
Which raises another question: When (and it will be when) it becomes as socially unacceptable to openly express LBGTQ-phobia as racism or sexism, who will the wingnuts (and wider society) pick as the Socially Acceptable Hate Object?
Litlebritdifrnt
@QuaintIrene: Hannity’s latest advertiser is foodinsurance.com, freeze dried meals that will last a lifetime!
Amanda in the South Bay
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
True, pre-Obama I wouldn’t have thought much of the immigration perspective, since the prevailing Catholic-Prot fundygelical belief is that the gender you were assigned at birth can never, ever be changed, hence the language of “natural born.”
Which is extremely counterproductive, since they would be banning heterosexual marriages (a trans person and non trans person of the opposite gender) and validating same sex marriages (a trans person and a non trans person of the same gender assigned at birth).
Though that’s prob optimistic, since they prob just want to “other” trans people and not allow us to marry anyone at all.
+3 a couple of hours before I go to school tonight.
Kirk Spencer
My basic question to the gold nuts is to ask about paying for something cheap. Say I want just a cup of coffee while on the road, how are we going to do this gold exchange bit?
Forcing them to work out the mechanics is entertaining. It’s worse if they’ve just pushed the “gold should be at $10,000/ounce” line.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
Robots.
S. cerevisiae
Actually if I thought inflation was going into hyperdrive I would max out my credit on durable goods.
Roger Moore
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Fixt. I’m sure that the fundies would ban gender reassignment surgery if they could and try to “cure” Trans people the same way they want to “cure” gays. Demonizing you and trying to make you second class citizens is just the best they can actually accomplish right now.
Tonal Crow
@Roger Moore: Lib’rals. Hippies. Europeans. Volvo drivers. Latte sippers. Dirt Worshippers. Et al.
Roger Moore
@Tonal Crow:
Yes, and gold has been abused to the point that ordinary people should steer clear. Gold moves around because people are worried about inflation and think of gold as “safe money”, not because of changes in the relative amounts of gold being mined and used industrially. It’s almost all speculation, rather than market fundamentals, and that makes it crazy to see it as an investment rather than a pure gamble.
Tom65
@Batocchio:
OK, I was kind of ambivalent about the anal sex, but outlawing oral sex? That’s crazy talk.
El Cid
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: YES! We are a consumer driven economy — WE NEED SOME INFLATION RIGHT NOW.
Again, I think the talk radio bastards have the average schmuck thinking that “not being able to afford as much any more” means “inflation”. Assholes.
ms badger
@Resident Firebagger: I bought when the stupid Hunt brothers were trying to control the flipping silver market. Roughly $10.00/ounce.
On the other hand, I have something to put out on New Year’s to re-enact the Irish old-wives tale “Put silver out in the old year and bring it in the new.” Hasn’t worked for shit.
El Cid
Hey, at least with silver you can take a colloidal form as a nutritional supplement in order to kill all the foreign micro-organisms in your body.
It doesn’t do that, but it can help turn your skin permanently blue.
MattR
@El Cid: I hate that Avatar has turned the Smurfs into a secondary thought.
Uloborus
@Roger Moore:
I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sure stated fundie religious platform isn’t stoning TGs and gays to death only because they don’t think they can get away with saying it. And right now, they’re changing their minds about what they can get away with saying, aren’t they?
MikeBoyScout
Idaho has always had a robust mining industry, but if I were a Republican Idahoan WINGNUT pushing investment advice in a party platform, I’d push potatoes.
râŹnato
I would love it if teabaggers lost their shirts investing in gold…
Veritas78
Precious metals are the ultimate sucker markets. It takes icy nerves to make a killing by selling when everyone else is panicking. Which is EXACTLY what typical buyers of gold would never do. When everyone is panicking, they’ll buy more gold.
In that sense, it’s just like every other market, just exaggerated.
And to the upstream poster who posited that the government had inflated the money supply — oops, it was the Fed who actually handed over the printing press to the CDO-squared bunch, with their 600-1 leverage, and they printed 50 trillion in notes no human labor could back. Now that cash is sloshing around, looking for a safe harbor, and (by definition), there isn’t one. Too bad that, for the rest of our lives, we will have way too much money chasing anything deemed valuable at the moment.
The only undervalued commodity today is hard work.
tootiredoftheright
Honestly if there was a metal to buy platinum and several other metals would be it, not gold.
For some weird reason conspiracy nuts flock to buy nuts whenever the economy goes bad and hence drive the price up several hundred percent so when the economy recovers the price of gold plummets. Most of the price of gold right now is just due to the speculators and it’s looking like a lot of fraud is involved since a lot of the people who think they are buying gold are just buying paper certificates on gold that doesn’t even exist.
Used to be black truffles were worth more per ounce then gold.
Usage of gold isn’t that high outside of jewerly, most electronics no longer use that much due to better manufactoring, other metals are being used since they are either cheaper or better conductors.
When society collapses gold will be worthless same goes when the method for making gold makes it worthwhile. Yes there are indeed methods for making gold thing is they cost 20,000 per ounce one method involves using a supercollider to turn mercury into gold.
Nylund
@Tonal Crow: Except that since Beck, Paul, and the Gold Bugs have all gone crazy, the thing you’re hedging with is probably something in the midst of a speculative bubble.
But, more importantly, the signals we’re seeing from the inflation data are once again showing the threat of DEFLATION, not inflation. At the same time, the Fed has drastically increased the monetary base. This increase in the base has not lead to a huge increase in the broader measures of money because the velocity of money has been so low. In theory, should the velocity return to more normal levels, that huge monetary base could cause sudden (and large) amounts of inflationary pressure on the broader supply of money, but, the Fed is watching for that VERY carefully.
In short, it is my professional opinion that inflation isn’t much of a threat and disinflation or deflation are probably still looming as larger threats. People can buy gold if they want, but in my opinion its not so much a smart hedge as it is like buying a house to flip in 2004, pets.com stock in the late nineties, or oil futures just a couple years back. If you time it right, you can indeed make a lot of money, but the whole market seems a tad bubble-ish to me.
But mostly, so many of those “buy gold” places are pure scams that completely overcharge you. But also think about it. They are giving you gold in exchange for your money. Many the people with the gold think its a smart to sell it. Its like that old Rockefeller quote (I think it was him), “How do you buy low sell high? Buy when everyone else is selling, and sell when everyone else is buying.”
Honus
@Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: yeah but it would make the rich people a little less rich, so it must be avoided at all costs
Wordsmith
@Cacti: No, it’s not. When I was in Ohio for some years people sometimes gave me shit about being from Idaho. One thing I learned while ‘back east’ was that there were more hate groups and white separatist groups there than my little state could dream up. Places like Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky (points further south even).
Wordsmith
@strandedvandal: How many folks do you think know the Aryan Nations were sued and lost their property and have since migrated (for the most part) back east to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and somewhere else?
However we are talking the Republican party – here….
DPirate
Meanwhile, as “stocks fell sharply Tuesday”…
Uh, you have a better place for people to put their money? Chinese dollars might be the only thing better than commodities, for the little guy that isn’t privy to market manipulations, at least. Certainly gold is better than cash in the mattress, or did you miss the “hedge against inflation” part?
Notwithstanding all the threads regurgitating Krugman, apparently you believe that ‘The Economy is Basically Sound’? Please, spare us…
DPirate
@Nylund:
Oh, well, I feel so much better knowing that…
LanceThruster
It may have already been answered but the scam I always notice is the pitch about the stability (or expected rise in value) of gold/precious metals yet what is actually being sold is some sort of coin/commemorative/obscure currency which allows for an insanely wide berth in the fudge factoring of its value.
Did people that bought Krugerrands when they were all the rage do well?
When I get my hot tub time machine working, I’m going back to that narrow window when aluminum was more valuable than gold with all my beer empties (minus the pull tabs for the Ronald McDonald House charity) before they learned the proper processing method. Can’t think of any other practical method to get rich using a time machine (at least one of the hot tub variety).
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Those welfare queen roombas!
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
But gold *doesn’t create any value*. Rhodium, palladium*, rhenium, platinum, other precious metal: yep – they’re used as catalysts, and thus create value. Even silver. But chemically, gold just fricking sits there. The use of gold as nanoparticles isn’t going to outweigh its use as bullion. I’d invest in a gold mining company before putting money in straight gold. Gold’s a commodity with a low holding cost, but in the end it’s less socially useful than investing in pork bellies or orange juice futures. And gold is definitely frickin’ oversold now. And God help gold prices if the Indian financial sector evolves to the state where the Indian middle class, who suck up a lot of the world’s gold, can usefully invest in something else than jewelry.
(Dork note: My wedding ring is made out of palladium, ‘cos it was made during WW2 when private ownership of palladium was restricted by the Dictatorial Socialist FDR for inefficient big government project like winning the war against facism.)
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Any bets in five years time Fox will be running stories on impoverished seniors ripped off of their savings by investing in gold scams and WhyDidntObamaDoSomething?
Josh G.
Back in late 2006, the bullion value of ordinary nickels soared to nearly 7 cents. (It’s back down now – just below 5 cents, but the Mint is still producing them at a loss due to minting and transportation costs.)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-12-14-melting-ban-usat_x.htm
So if you’re worried about inflation, ordering bags of nickels from your local bank sounds like a better idea than investing in gold. At least with the nickels you are protected against nominal-dollar losses.
BTW, a nickel actually consists of 75% copper. We stopped using copper in cents in 1982 because it was too expensive. A modern-day cent is made of copper-plated zinc, and still costs more than a penny to produce and ship.
Tonal Crow
@Roger Moore: Any item’s market value depends, in significant part, on the market participants’ emotions. It’s true that the trade in some items (e.g., corn) usually is more strongly tied to some kind of relatively inelastic fundamentals (e.g., the need to eat) than the trade in other items (e.g., gold). That doesn’t make the latter a bad investment. But I agree that ordinary people should steer clear of gold. Indeed, ordinary people probably should steer clear of anything but paying down their debts and cutting up their credit cards.
grumpy realist
Have to admit my wildcat stock purchases have been in palladium…turns out palladium is useful in lower-temp fuel cells for scarfing up CO, which otherwise degrades the performance of the fuel cell over time.
Gold? Meh. Would love to see someone come up with an economically efficient way of processing gold out of seawater and drop the cost to industrial material level. Would be even happier if someone could do similarly for carbon and start producing bulk diamond per cubic meter.
Dr. Psycho
@grumpy realist: No, not by the cubic meter, but by the millimeter-wide kilometer length. Got to build that skyhook out of something.