pepactonius

In the last few weeks, I noticed that construction on a nearby condominium townhouse development has started up again, after a pause of 3-5 years. This is in upstate NY, BTW.) I wonder if they'll suspend it again, if things go bad, like many people expect?

Already circumvented?

Doesn't sound too bad to me -- preserving 30% of your "investment". This compares to perhaps 0% of funds held in brokerage accounts (despite SIPC), and bank accounts (despite FDIC). If you believe some blogs, it may even be possible to lose far more than 100% of your bank balance, depending on how things work out in bankruptcy court (clawback, etc.). Houses and other physical assets might tumble to 20% of their current real value. Cash in your safety deposit box could also end up almost worthless. Hopefully, all these assets won't go to zero at once. If gold does go to 30%, we can hope that paper currency and other mainstream investments do well. If there's hyperinflation, gold, collectibles, art, houses, etc. may preserve a reasonable fraction of their real value. If there's deflation, the cash in your safety deposit box will hold its value, and maybe you can even get something out of your bank and brokerage acounts? If there's real trouble (collapse, massive starvation, widespread cannibalism, etc.), I suppose nothing will save you -- just hope for a quick death. I have no idea what would happen in biflation (hyperinflationary deflation?). Why is it unreasonable to have some small portion of your assets in gold? If you look at gold as insurance against a semi-disaster, isn't the best outcome for gold to be a waste of money and effort?

It would be great if gold actually was in a bubble -- solid currencies everywhere, with lots of other (more convenient) investment choices yielding positive real returns. Now that they've saved the Euro and solved the budget deficit problems of the member countries using unelected officials, maybe the price of gold in Euros will start heading down, and stay down. In Europe, perhaps gold is in a bubble. In the US, Federal spending is completely out of control, and there's no realistic prospect getting things under control (unless you somehow put thick-skinned, unelected officials in charge the budget, who have the guts to force a die-off among the old, the poor, the disabled, disadvantaged minorities, etc). I expect the price of gold in dollars to generally rise over the next few years, until the US collapses. I suppose the real value of that gold could decline, though.

Apparently, resevoirs are at risk, too. Contaminated groundwater can seep into local streams and into resevoirs. It looks like fracking will be banned in the NYC watershed for this reason. Even the CEO of one of the drilling companies said he'd have to be brain-dead to start drilling in the watershed area. An accident that poisoned the NYC resevoirs could end up in bankruptcy for the company. BTW, my place is almost in the middle of the watershed area. With any luck, they'll be no gas wells nearby, at least Not In My Back Yard

From this side of the pond, it looks like the US is heading rapidly to ruin. Federal spending is completely out of control, and there's no way any elected politician is going to reduce the deficit by a single penny. They won't stop spending until there's some external force to stop them -- presumably a total collapse of the Federal government and the dollar, when they can't borrow/confiscate any more money to continue their spending. On the other hand, Europe appears to be on the way to unification and stability under the leadership of Germany. The new central European governement can easily impose harsh austerity budgets on the various countries, overriding the elected national politicians. When countries get in trouble, they can just dissolve the national government and appoint a special administrator to go in and clean things up (sort of what may happen to Detroit and other bankrupt cities in the US.) I suspect Europe will be on a sustainable path to long-term stability (maybe not prosperity, though) long before the US collapses into chaos. Maybe this is a case of the grass looking greener over there?

US exporters? -- I wonder how much consumer stuff is exported from the US to China.

The Euro is soaring today, vs the Dollar. It looks pretty sound (for now).

Pittsburgh? Maybe houses are relatively cheap there, and that's a factor in the rankings?

I wonder if tomorrow really could be "Black Friday"? It seems we've been hearing about Black Friday on the radio and TV for months now. Some places are jumping the gun a bit, and starting Black Friday on thursday evening. On this side of the pond, it's a good day to stay out of the stores -- maybe I'll go hunting up in the Catskills (for mouse -- bagged 14 so far this year).

The way the US government is spending, the dollar will eventually become almost worthless. There's no way elected US politicians can enact the roughly 60% cuts in the federal budget necessary to get back on a sustainable course. The price of gold in dollars will approach infinity, although gold may not become more valuable in real terms. In Europe, where harsh austerity budgets can be imposed and manufacturing is a lot more competitive, currencies should be a lot more stable along with the price of gold.

In a true deflation, holding cash might be good, if you can avoid losing it. In a real deflation, banks and CD issuers may go bankrupt, and perhaps the government deposit insurance couldn't pay off. In this case, paper currency might be best. We also hear about "hyperinflationary deflation", where all your investments and assets (including gold) decline in value, as does your income. The unavoidable expenses (food, water, fuel, taxes, etc.) skyrocket, so your paper money and gold become worthless compared to what you need. In this case, purchasing nonperishable stuff in advance might make sense.

It's beginning to look like Europe is the area that's getting its act together, not the US -- harsh austerity budgets being imposed on individual nations by unelected technocrats and by the EU apparatus. In the US, politicians are still running the show, and there's no way any politician wants to get blamed for an austerity budget that forces even a minor die-off among the elderly, the poor, the sick or disabled, disadvantaged minorities, etc. The only way to save the US financially is for some external force that doesn't care about people and votes to come along and get taxes and spending in balance. Since that's not likely to happen, the only thing the US can look forward to is financial collapse and chaos.

I guess it depends on how much you're getting. If you plan to convert 100,000+ Pounds UK into PMs, gold is a whole lot less bulky than silver, and easier to store in a safety deposit box or hide somewhere. Of course, gold may have a higher risk of government confiscation in the future.

In many states, if you buy "investment quantities" of gold, silver, platinum, etc., there is no sales tax. For Silver Eagles in NY state, for example, you need to buy at least $1000.00 worth each place you buy from (and also pay less than 40% over the spot price). For gold, you need to buy at least $1000 worth, and pay no more than 15% or 20% over spot, depending on the size of the coins.

Actually, the dollar has lost almost 99% of its value against gold over the years. Gold was less than $20/Oz from 1795 to 1834 vs $1600-$1900/Oz currently.

Maybe this is why the US is on the way to more energy self-sufficiency? A partial (but not total) economic collapse could cut oil demand way back

Let's hope the Russians are paying for all this.

Most stamps nowadays don't have a value printed on them. These are the inflation-protected "forever" stamps, that will remain good for 1oz first-class postage, even after any future rate hikes. The only printing on the stamps reads "USA FIRST-CLASS FOREVER". I suppose there are still some stamps with fixed dollar values, however. In the old days (during the Civil War, for example), they used to use encased postage stamps in place of coins.

Unless China somehow manages to make a move into Siberia, and the Russians can't stop them.

Silver is starting to look a bit more interesting now. Maybe if the price gets down towards $20/oz, I might be tempted to dabble a bit in some US "junk silver". The big problem with silver is still its sheer bulk and weight, so it's hard to store a lot value in a small space (compared to gold). The junk silver I have now came directly from circulation back in the mid-1960s, and is pretty heavy on quarters, especially 1964's. I'd probably go for a small bag of half dollars, just out of curiosity, as I don't have many of them currently.

Actually, there's a lot less paper in my office than 35 years ago. Back then, we had no PCs or terminals in the office, so we had lots of printed manuals and books, and kept refrerence listings of the code we supported. Various working documents were printed out and placed in notebooks. Back then I had two "5-highs" (about 30 feet of shelf space) that were 80% filled with paper printouts of one kind or another. We debugged software problems from printed dumps. We used to get printed paper memos through the office mail. Before that, back in the 1960s, we stored program source on punched cards (couldn't trust disks back then), and even operating system binaries were distributed on cards (IBM 1130 system). Now, I have a single 5-high, and only about 5 feet of shelf space contains printed paper of some sort. With PCs in the office, specs/working documents are all online, and email has 100% replaced office memos. Dumps (millions? of pages long) are looked at with a software dump viewer. Listings are online, too (they're also thousands of pages long these days, especially C/C++). I print out only selected pages/chapters of few manuals, for quick reference. Other stuff is seldom printed out. Paper has probably been reduced 80-90%, and is perhaps 95-99% less than it would be if we used the same methods now as in the 1960s.

A few years back, I used to view the Implode-O-Meter page itself every so often, but never the forum pages. There are so many financial/economics forums around, but not many Implode-O-Meters.

Wouldn't that be a great outcome, though? If gold did lose 70% of its value in the next 5 years, I assume that the dollar and other paper currencies would be in solid shape. Any purchasing power losses from the gold should be more than made up for by real returns from the other financial investments. My goal it to have the "right" amount of gold, so I don't care too much if the price of gold goes up or down, within reason. If it goes up, and we don't end up in a doomsday scenario, thank goodness I have some. If it goes down, even better, since I don't have too much. If you look things pessimistically, this strategy could also mean you lose either way.

I wonder if that'll change now that China's stepping in to buy up all the questionable sovereign debt in Europe? I guess the various banks/etc. can now unload a lot of their problem debt and emerge with much cleaner balance sheets. Maybe China will also dump some of their dollar reserves as they gobble up all that bad debt?