That could certainly be the case, but how should I interpret the wearing of wealth? Are they wearing it as a status symbol--this shows how wealthy I am!--or are they were wearing around a physical investment that they're going to cash in for retirement? I would think the former, which would mean it's really not an investment. If you bid the price up because you were so eager to obtain it and the primary goal is to wear it, that seems to suggest ambivalence about value, especially if the stuff is rarely liquidated. But perhaps your Indian expat had some insight on these questions as well?
Impossible! The deficit is falling as well as unemployment Obama wrecking economy
- Thread starter ChesusRice
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cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
I meant it in the latter sense. It really was the 401(k) on the wife's forearms. Of course, in the past 30 years India has globalized so much that the former sense must have made huge inroads. But among the many hundreds of millions of Indians who haven't ridden the sleighride into the middle class, gold remains the trusted repository of wealth, the kind that takes one through hard times or marrying off daughters.
From what i remeber, it was a very liquid investment with a narrow bid/ask spread and numerous points of trade. So selling gold for need only to buy more later didn't have the sort of barriers a less liquid investement, like land, migh have imposed. Fwiw. cn
Mr Neutron
Well-Known Member
Still waiting for you to back this up.
I will probably have to remind you of the very simple basic rule of economy. Supply and Demand.
Things SHOULD cost less because we have more of them. If everyone and their dog had 15 tons of pure gold, gold would be worthless.
When you say things like this it completely undoes every argument you have.
in 1913 most people could make a living on less than $100 a year. Now most people are debt slaves and have to live in small prisons called apartments crammed all together in crime infested cities. All of these prisoners are inundated daily with the most powerful propaganda tools ever devised.
Most don't even realize they are prisoners.
By design.
Someone tells you that the Inflation numbers don't jive with reality.
You use the inflation numbers to try and make your "Math" look correct.
You don't seem to understand the flaw here.
***Wonders when Captain Obvious will make an appearance***
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
the entire point of gold. Cash price of gold is really meaningless to an Indian, because the GOLD IS THE WEALTH. People are so biased by their life as a US Wage slave that they fail to understand that in other countries, if you want to buy a home, you just give the seller some gold.
GOLD IS MONEY AND NOTHING ELSE!
Gold has the least marginal utility of just about anything. It is nearly useless. Except as money.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
Until electronics. As a microcontact material, it is head and shoulders above the alternatives. cn
Well I would agree with you and disagree with you. Most of the gold used for electrical contacts gets recycled back into electrical contacts. Hence the reason that only 10 tons or less of gold is ever used for industrial applications in aggregate over the entire world.
Gold is mined at the rate of about 2,500 tons per year.
Making industrial use of gold a .04% proposition. 99.96% of gold is NOT used for industry.
Unlike Silver which is 60-70% industrial, of which the only substitute in most of those products that require it is Gold, perhaps Platinum.
70% of Platinum is used for industry.
Platinum means "Little Silver."
Platinum is actually a better anti corrosion contact material than gold, but since its 20 times as rare, not used so much except where high temperature performance is needed.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
The platinum metals are aces, and until we snag an asteroid they're too scarce. Maybe in a century iridium will be as cheap as, say, indium*. Yeeeehawww! cn
*I own a kilo of indium. If I owned a kilo of iridium, I'd be fat&happy. I ain't fat, and I leave the other as an exercise to the reader. ~giggle~ cn
I agree. All the noble metals will be good plays in the future IMO.
Don't forget Rhenium.
I myself could stand to lose 30 pounds.
I am pretty pissed with myself that i didn't buy that kilo of rhenium when i could afford it. i was building a gonzo hands-on periodic table. You should see my tantalum sample. cn
Mr Neutron
Well-Known Member
Who got the $16B? http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-feds-16-trillion-bailouts-under-reported/
OK!
PCE, CPI, CPE, PCI, KMA... whatever the acronym of the day is, if you don't figure in fuel and food, what good is it to you and me?
I think I have discovered the problem. 25 cents to $13 is not a 520% increase, check your math.
But that is not the real issue, anyway. The measurements we use are from 100 years of debt issued fiat currency/inflation. We cannot use the numbers that would exist if we had NOT started this madness. Statistics are like a bikini, they show a lot but they don't show everything and what they don't show is often more revealing than what they DO show.
Where would we be economically if we had taken the high road and said NO to the Creature from Jekyll Island? There is no way to be certain but I suspect that the wealth gap would not be nearly what it is and that prosperity (and the freedom from the IRS crawling up your ass on a yearly basis) would be greater than in any time in out history.
twostrokenut
Well-Known Member
Didn't show up in my search either but there it is.....kinda serves to show you aren't reading everything posted here.
twostrokenut
Well-Known Member
Your opinion of this simply doesn't matter....just like the central planners opinion on this doesn't matter. It is the law, not because it's written on paper....just like gravity....... and if manipulated the correction comes on with a VENGANCE. You are missing the point of gold/silver vs paper investments....paper might pay better if someone's grandpa were to invest but gold/silver has no risk of loss as a long term investment because its value is compared to our current fiat currency. You have yet to address this.
See how that works? We pay more because the supply is shorter? If we could simply build more silver/gold fabrication capacity wouldn't we have already? Fiat currency is not produced in the core of a Supernova explosion......it is produced in the mind and this is why it is unstable when people "lose faith" in it. People produced the modern world DESPITE fractional reserve lending holding them back.tokeprep said:
Why don't we just increase the minimum wage to whatever we want to make everything awesome? Let's make it $100 per hour and solve the world's problems that should work right?
Dr Kynes
Well-Known Member
dont be deliberately obtuse, the DX badge was disciontinued a few years ago, the base model LX is now what the DX used to be. i should think you would be able to figure out what Base Model means, even if they shuffle the letters about.
http://www.cargurus.com/Cars/1990-Honda-Accord-Price-c2164
1990 Honda accord DX: $12,145 (Base Model)
http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-sedan/price.aspx
2013 honda accord LX : $21,680 (base Model)
so thats pretty close to 2x the price, but by your own logic the 1990 accord was bought using 1990 dollars,, while the 2013 accord must be bought using the new, more plentiful and less valuable 2013 Obama-Bucks
you cannot have it both ways.
further, 2013 accord LX in california costs $22470 + taxes (higher than 1990) dealer prep (higher than 1990) registration (higher than 1990) etc etc etc.
http://melraptonhonda.uptracs.com/inventory/new.html?manufacturer=Honda&model=Accord&start_index=1
so the car costs nearly 2x more than it did in 1990, for the same base model. are entry level clerical workers making 2x more now than they were in 1990?
are janitors making 2x more now than they were in 1990?
are teachers making 2x more now than they were in 1990?
your patently obvious math games are unconvincing, under your deliberately deceptive arithmetic acrobatics, the dollar is MORE powerful now than it was in 1990, and buys MORE shit, and that is clearly untrrue since the treasury and the fed have a TARGET of 3% loss of value every fucking year for the dollar
Just the right amount of sarcasm, good job!
My later Google searches didn't find much additional information, but what I did find seemed to go both ways (adding the idea that some people see it as an emergency fund). That leads me to think the truth is somewhere in the middle, or maybe it just depends on exactly how high your social class is.
Whatever the case, if one of the largest buyers of the commodity buys a lot less, that doesn't bode well for the price. If you make the real price of gold more expensive in India, that probably will temper demand.
At least when you make a strategic cut like that. Here's the paragraph in context: "Things shouldn't cost less just because we have more of them. In 1913...a couple hundred million people...use[d] all of the resources that existed in the world. Today, there are several billion people using the same amount of resources. You should expect that those resources are going to be more expensive, relatively, even though supplies increased, because demand outpaced those supply increases."
When supply is matched with demand, prices don't decrease.
What's your basis for saying most people could live on less than $100 a year in 1913?
Do you not recall the last discussion we had about inflation numbers? You explained how they worked to everyone, and then we figured out that you were totally wrong. The result you predicted, based on your understanding of how inflation was calculated, was directly contradicted by the result BLS calculated (your estimate was no inflation in a category, while the BLS actually showed 100% inflation, or something like that).
Indeed, I seem to recall you never replying at all to that post. Maybe you ought to dredge it up if you want to talk about incorrect math.