HOLY SHIT!!!!! I was getting ready to throw in the towel, and I find out that my site was referenced in TIME MAGAZINE, MAY 19. 2010 edition!!!!
How do I take advantage of this golden opportunity??? Thanks!! God bless!!
Gold Fated
By David Von Drehle Monday, May. 17, 2010
One particularly grim day in the middle of the financial collapse, as the value of my retirement account plummeted like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff, my brother asked me if I had considered buying gold. Without thinking, I said, "I'm not quite ready to dig a bunker in the backyard." Which was a silly thing to say about a perfectly reasonable investment, one that has appealed to figures as diverse as Cleopatra, King Midas, the Rothschilds and the villain in Goldfinger. On reflection, though, what struck me was that my brother immediately got what I was saying. Gold is an element, it's a commodity, but it is also, for many people, an extreme political statement. When you are no longer willing to buy anything they're telling you to, that's the time to buy gold. Don't hunker down for the apocalypse without it.
Gold is the color of anxiety, a hedge against fear. Its price tends to soar when times are stormy and crash when the rainbows reappear. Not surprisingly, when the subprime bubble burst in 2007, a 21st century gold fever gripped the U.S. and convulsed the globe, prompting buy orders from kitchen-table investors as well as high-flying traders like David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. Profits have spiked at gold-mining companies.
(See pictures of modern-day gold prospectors.) http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1903119,00.html
High gold prices--north of $1,100 per ounce, roughly double the pre-crisis price--have pried open jewelry boxes from coast to coast, as would-be sellers decide that the sentimental value of old gifts and bygone bling is no match for quick cash. People have been trading in their rings, bracelets, necklaces and watches at pawnshops, jewelry stores and heavily promoted buying events in the conference rooms of suburban motels. Or you can monetize your memories in the comfort of your own living room, for just as suburban domesticity once begat the Tupperware party, fiscal chaos has now given us the gold party, at which friends gather to have their trinkets assayed by merchants bearing rolls of green. "As long as the price is up, people keep coming," said Bob Jenkins, a Gold Stash for Cash party promoter based in Overland Park, Kans.
There is nothing arbitrary about the grip of gold on the human imagination. It is an amazing metal. Gold can be pounded into a sheet so thin that light passes through it, yet the sheet doesn't crack. Gold can be stretched into wires thinner than a human hair, yet those wires still conduct electricity beautifully. Implant it in a human body in the form of a medical device, and it will resist the growth of bacteria. Gold is beautiful, pliable, ductile, strong. The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age all came and went, but gold is forever. Contrast that with, say, collateralized debt obligations, whatever those are, or the concept of collecting insurance on bad investments made by other people--so-called credit-default swaps. In a world of unreal investments, reality must finally have its day, and there is nothing more real than periodic-table element No. 79--favored shelter from the financial storm.
This pattern is as old as legal tender: gold is the contrary indicator of peace and prosperity. And the reason for this relationship is simple. When it comes to money, gold is, well, the gold standard. As other forms of stored value--paper banknotes, government bonds, inked entries in bank ledgers--came into widespread use, they were understood to represent actual amounts of precious metal. Someone with a pocketful of paper could, if so moved, exchange it for actual gold. When times were good, very few people felt any desire to do so. Gold was heavy and cumbersome compared with paper money. However, when times looked bad, the abstract symbols of value tended to break away from the underlying metal, because a government facing a crisis could print banknotes or issue bonds a lot faster than it could find more gold. The result is inflation, which eats away at the value of money. A really badly run government, like those of Weimar Germany or modern-day Zimbabwe, might create so much money that it becomes virtually worthless; in Harare, you can meet homeless trillionaires. Gold, however, never goes to zero. The menace of inflation leads some conservatives, like Texas Congressman Ron Paul, to talk about gold-backed money as "honest" money, in contrast to the money we have in our pockets. The U.S. cut its last link to the gold standard in 1971, but it was effectively finished prior to World War I by a series of credit shortages that led to bank panics. Gold may be honest, and tangible, but it is not nearly as powerful an economic tool as the more abstract forms of money that have taken its place.
The miracles of the modern world weren't wrought by gold; they were wrought in large part by abstract money, because it has an attribute that gold can't mimic. It can grow. The Fed poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy to refloat it, backed not by gold but by the full faith and credit of the U.S.
If everybody had to carry bags of precious metal around to buy things or if every ledger entry on a banker's computer screen had to be backed by a gold bar in a vault somewhere, economies would grow a lot more slowly or, in a panic, they would shrink. On the other hand, this engine revs only if people have faith that those ledger entries, those pixels, those scraps of green paper, represent actual value. Abstract money is an awesome thing--as long as people believe in it. But suppose that belief were to collapse one day and all the customers of the bank tried to empty their accounts at once. They would discover that the money wasn't there.
(See pictures of the global financial crisis.)
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1845923_1774401,00.html
On survivalist blogs and websites with names like
Guns, Grub and Gold, they have a term for what will happen next: TEOTWAWKI, which stands for "the end of the world as we know it." When that time comes, along with freeze-dried food and water-purification tablets and plenty of ammo, a person is going to need some gold in his camouflage pockets. "Tangibles trump conceptuals" is among the key precepts of leading survivalist author and blogger J.W. Rawles. "Modern fiat currencies are generally accepted but have essentially no backing," he explains. "Because they are largely a by-product of interest-bearing debt, modern currencies are destined to inflation" and ultimately "to collapse." Rawles advises investing first in farmland, next in "useful hand tools" and finally in precious metals like gold.
Thus, as global finance has grown ever more complex, gold has become a badge of mistrust in the modern political economy. A stack of gold coins in your gun safe, as an online survivalist put it in an anonymous post, signals that you won't be caught flat-footed when FEMA opens concentration camps, or when the U.N. imposes the new world order, or when terrorists wipe out the grid, or when the Mayan prophecy comes true, or when Israel attacks Iran and World War III ensues. Gold dealers have clearly figured this out; they advertise heavily on the radio talk shows of such doomsday-minded libertarians as George Noory, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and G. Gordon Liddy.
The problem with doomsday investing is that it's difficult to cash out. And you can be wrong for decades. An ounce of gold sold for $675 in January 1980. The price in January 2001: $265. The price of gold hasn't gone up any lately, as the global economy slowly recovers, and central bankers are serene about inflation. According to a blog on the Wall Street Journal's website, gold has lost "luster" with China's government, and the International Monetary Fund is selling a big chunk of its stash. Is this the end of gold fever for now? That depends on which way the fear index goes. Here's something to watch, though: on some survivalist blogs, a hot debate has recently opened, led by skeptics questioning the utility of gold. The smart play for the well prepared, they now argue, is silver.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1987605-1,00.html
Thanks again!
