Thursday With the US$ (and other currencies) gaining in strength in the last 36hrs, I’ve been busy answering my phone and emails. “What’s happening to the ‘price of Gold’?” I’ve almost given up trying to explain that Gold is a store of stable value and that it is the currencies that are going up and down as measured by Gold. It is because they cannot grasp that … [Read more...]
Shorting the Market
Sunday Stocks exist in Australia that allow one to short the market – i.e. bet that the market is going to go down. I own some – BBOZ. Please do not take what follows as any sort of investment advice. I have a record as a stock tipper almost as bad as that of my picking winners of the Melbourne Cup. I have no idea from whence BBOZ’s income is derived, nor do I really … [Read more...]
Stock Market Reality Show
Sunday Kanye West has bought stocks which beat the market by 40{781366457d9c05ca9285c5eb3e04ac75968647e24436986cab65f74e6f4b3aad} over the last year. How do I know? It’s on the front page of Yahoo Finance today. That struck me as reducing the serious business of investing in productive enterprises in order to obtain a return to the level of a television Reality … [Read more...]
Bubbles
Sunday I have just read an article repeating the claim that bubbles are a part of the human condition. They are not. They have a very specific and easily avoidable cause. Bubbles are created by the lack of Gold in circulation. Lacking Gold, there is no access to a store of stable value. Without that, people look for other ways to maintain the value of their wealth. … [Read more...]
Government Defaults Begin
Wednesday Governments push out credit by means of buying bonds. They pay for the bonds by printing debt notes. On their ledger go the bonds as assets and the debt notes as liabilities. What we know as paper ‘money’ are actually IOUs – the opposite of money. When central banks buy bonds, it drives their price up and makes them less available to other market … [Read more...]