sharper

My understanding is China is still very backward in agriculture - which means a lot of room to increase yields through capital investment on the same land

One question I had is if there is an example where central banks creating money to buy assets did not result in high inflation? For example Kennedy adopted similar policies and look at the 1970s Interest rates will rise when the government is the only buyer of government debt. We are starting to see signs of this in japanese bond markets (a quadrillion yen market) which was closed several times due to large volatility due to massive government purchases and massive private sector sales not happening at the same time.

let's hope nothing else plays out like 2008

i will be buying from one of the big firms this week; although even the large gold coin dealers have raised their bid offer spreads considerably in the last week

I agree - a bubble is when everyone is buying it even your grandmother. Right now we are seeing a bubble of selling gold on UK high streets with those small shops accepting "unwanted gold" almost everywhere and a mass movement of selling. Once people understand that the banking system will cease their savings(Cyprus); that their pensions will be taken by the government (Hungary); that western government bonds will default and that shares will crash where else can you put your money? I see the western governments treatment of gold in a similar fashion to the German retreat from Russia in WW2. They are facing a losing battle, the price cannot be controlled, but they can control the volatility of gold so we should expect a rising trend with large volatility - exactly the movements of the last 10 years. I understand there has been a significanr physical gold buy since last week across the world. I myself attempted to buy some this weekend, but my usual dealer in my local town told me the price might have crashed elsewhere but was not down at all here. My guess is the crash in price will have brought forward the end of the rigged paper gold market and the return of the gold standard.

is it possible to call gold a bubble ever? For internet stocks there is some limit on the price - the net present value of future expected dividends For property there is a link to salaries and mortgage availability what is the constraint for gold? why not a million pounds an ounce? what is stopping it go that high? the central banks have not had a gold audit - so who knows what the actual supply is

I recall the day HBOS crunched on this forum was fairly heroic with some great short term trading ideas. Seems like a similar scenario. I was looking at Barrick Gold - gold seems to be doing well so far given everything else is tanking; but Barrick Gold has gone down a lot today. Any other ideas - thanks

that does not say much for its value as a currency if it can only be used with certain people. also might make it difficult to sell as an investment

thank you for all the replies - that is helpful. interesting that the ping test works for gold and silver - it is probably some fiendishly complicated chemistry answer, but any idea why?

I am looking for a freely available commercial property index online - can anyone recommend one which has a historical time series? I have had a look around and could not find one. The retail price indices on this site are useful. I would like to fit various probability distributions to the data and ideally glean some thing of the nature of the index movements. Will upload the key results in the outside chance anyone other than me is interested. Many thanks in advance

To check a gold coin is really gold I weight it check the size and then give it the flick test. If it rings true - I know it is gold. Is there some similar check for silver? A silver coins easily faked? Many thanks for any guidance

Good to add some balance - but the media was so biased in the direction you are posting there is no need for any more guff. The BBC is a great media organisation, most people against it are Murdoch drones. What is the actual argument against the BBC?

thanks for the head up - Adam Curtis is one of the most talented film makers alive - in my view, THE most talented.

i have an account with NatWest - it was free for the first year, then about 3.50 a month. i just opened one with HSBC which i think is the same deal of free for a year, then a monthly charge. their charges are higher than the interest i get on the account which is very small despite having a lot of cash in it. it is impressive that they charge me money for the pleasure of lending to them - it has been like this since rates crashed to 0.5%

The free market leads to fascism - which history has shown is a bad thing. The problem is that in a free market wealth is not distributed in a normally distributed way. It has an extreme of distributions. So people do not just get a bit richer than other - but many times richer - millions/billions of times richer - often through no great skill or merit. To understand the difference between something normally distributed and something extremely distributed Take 1000 people who are your friends or family - take their average height. Say 1.5m including children. Now take the tallest man in the world - the tallest in history according to google was 2.72m. Add this to your sample - the new average height is 1.5012m. The tallest man in the world is a blip in your sample Now consider the wealth of the same 1000 people. Let's say your sample is all ages and the average wealth is about $100,000. Now take the richest man in the world - estimates differ but $50bn was one estimate for Gate's wealth. Add this to your sample. The combined wealth of your 1000 friends is massively smaller than this one persons wealth - the new average is over $50m. If we transfer the ratio of average wealth to average height - that would make someone 750km tall - they could lie their head down in Spain at night It is this extreme nature of the distribution of wealth (noticed by Pareto) that causes gross inequalities. Now these inequalities are not in themselves a problem, but it is human nature to take advantage of them. So the hugely wealthy can effectively subvert democracies with their interest groups and lobbys and get those democracies to work in their interests instead. This is what we have seen in the US - free market to fascist economy in 300 years. An no one knows how to stop it. One approach that has worked well so far is practised in Scandinavia - that answers your question.