Gold, silver and gold, all you can hold...

[elmo_iscariot]

Market watch: Gold bugs’ unmerry Christmas

Santa brought the gold bugs quite a present last week. It was very big and extremely nasty...

From the previous Friday’s close to the low on Thursday, the CME February gold contract...plunged $82.10 or 5.1%...The article, apart from comments about "radical gold bugs" is even in tone, but the

Comments

[theweaselking]

I don't hoard gold, for a variety of reasons.

The main one for me being that the people *selling* the gold are doing so at a huge markup, to take advantage of the kind of panicked suckers who listen to Glenn Beck and vote for Ron Paul. All of the "buy gold! It's an INVESTMENT! I will sell it to you!" scams are exactly that, scams: They sell you gold at a 40% markup over the CURRENT price.

[elmo_iscariot]

Precious metals are widely available near spot, both by mail order and in brick and mortar; if a body wants to seriously invest in PMs, there are plenty of legitimate options. There's a coin shop a couple miles from here that sells bullion at, if I remember correctly, two percent over spot. The folks who are buying insanely marked up gold out of the backs of magazines or off talk radio would otherwise be "investing" in collectible plates.

For my taste, the PM market is just too subject to unpredictable political factors, and I haven't completely given up on the possibility of a financial recovery in the short term, which would kill anybody investing in gold to make money. I get buying it up as a hedge against catastrophe, but to make money? That made sense in 2002, but it's just to iffy now.

I also think there's a good case to be made that the gold/silver value ratio is very badly distorted, and that we may see a hard correction against gold, but that's another matter entirely.