Monty Pelerin offers some investment advice and then asks his readers what they would suggest. I responded with the following comment:

Gold mining companies may be good in the sense that their assets (NAV–Net Asset Value) are largely trapped under ground and brought to the surface at a slow rate and sold for profit; thus they will still be recovering value from the ground when money has collapsed and gold is needed as a currency. I think the same is true of Canadian oil companies, which have large stores of oil and gas in the ground (i.e., NPV–Net Potential Value)–the Cardium and Swan Hills are largely, e.g., are known quantities exploited by vertical drilling and are now offer new yield through new technologies, i.e., horizontal drilling and multi-fracking. Billions of barrels remain in the ground, and EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) methods, such as the injection of natural gas, that companies like Petrobakken (see this post) and Crescent Point are beginning to employ promises to produce as much as 25% more recoverable oil from the fields–this means that these companies could increase their NAV by as much as 5 times, since their current NAV is based on 5% recoverable oil. The US has a lot of oil too, but the Canadian regulatory environment remains for now a far more favourable than in the US. Yet this remains high risk, and my portfolio which consists most of these oil companies and few miners is suffering YTD.

After your last post by Ann Barnhardt, and the news coming from Gerald Celente about how his cash was stolen from his brokerage account, one wonders if any brokerage account is safe any more.

Thus, the operative word in all this is risk. Nothing is safe. Perhaps the best thing is to focus on what is “real” as opposed to what is “safe”. Fiat money is not real, for our estimation of all that is denominated in nominal currency is actually a reification–the assigning of concrete value to an abstraction. What is real? Physical gold & silver, wine kits (see Wine as Currency), spam, beans, unused toilet paper, used aluminium beverage cans. What is reified? Bonds, derivatives, currencies, the value of gold in terms of fiat currency, etc. I have a canned spam collection, Monty Python not withstanding–mind you, I like spam. It has a long shelf life and is good food during times of crisis–that’s why my Korean family from Hawaii used to eat a lot of it–it could survive the sea journey from the mainland and was a staple during WWII.