gold

Stuck on stupid: celebrating $1500 gold and the East Coast geniuses that made it possible

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Earlier Posts:  I. More education bubble stuff

Just after Barack Hussein Obama was elected in November, 2008, I was at an academic conference in Boston.  There was a Festschrift celebration for one my profs, at which I met a childhood friend of his–my prof grew up in the Boston area.  Once this elderly “gentleman” learned that I grew up in the state of Alaska, he became red-faced and angry, “What’s wrong with you people in Alaska?  Has the cold weather frozen your brains?”  Well, one could have asked the same thing of Boston residents that year–it was a distinctly cold November.  He continued, “That Sarah Palin is such an idiot!”  Well, I wonder whether Miss Manners would think it proper to talk in this manner with a new acquaintance.  I mean Sarah Palin enjoyed a very high approval rating in the State of Alaska and if I shared the view of the majority, then this East Coast snob was insulting me as stupid along with my fellow Alaskans.  Most of the people in that room held PhDs–so the gratuitous insults were uncalled for.  Well, I couldn’t really think of anything to say, but by this time I was pretty hot under the collar:  “Sir,” I said, “The our problem in Alaska is that when we are hungry and need to eat, we have to go outside and kill something.”

Then my new East Coast friend started to talk about Barack Hussein Obama:  “He’s so smart.  He talks so well.  I just know he’s going to be a better president than that idiot Bush.”

Then one morning in Grand Cayman at Christmas there was a “lady” sitting with me under the veranda at the pool of the hotel.  We began to discuss where she was from:  Washington D.C.  I told her about growing up in Alaska but that I now live in Canada.  “I am going to move to Canada,” she said, “If Sarah Palin ever becomes president.”  Wow.  Miss Manners where are you?  But this brilliant woman doesn’t understand the first thing about Canada Immigration or moving to another country.  It sometimes takes years to get your paperwork.  I know people married to Canadians who have taken over two years to get landed status, and this lady thinks she can just walk up here and live in Canada.  I hate to tell you this, but this is not the Viet Nam War era, and Pierre Trudeau is not the president of Canada anymore.

Well, to all you brilliant people on the East Coast who think you are smarter than us Alaskans who kill animals to put food on the table, I dedicate this post.  I love what your President and your Federal Reserve Chair have done to the value of my gold portfolio.  In the words of Mogambo Guru, “Whee!  This investing stuff is easy!”

In an earlier post I listed the East Coast schools of some the people responsible for $1300 gold.  I repeat that list here (Harvard, by the way, is in Boston):

Barack Obama, Columbia, Harvard

Ben Bernanke, Harvard, MIT

Alan Greenspan, Columbia, NYU

Hank Paulson, Harvard (MBA)

Paul Krugman, Yale, MIT

Tim Geitner, Dartmouth, John Hopkins

Larry Summer, MIT, Harvard

But some of us people who don’t enjoy PhDs from these schools where the genius go, don’t believe it is advanced economic theory that is going to help the economy, but common sense.  Yesterday, in a seminal article, Monty Pelerin summarized our main problems under five points:

  1. An Incompetent President – The President is inexperienced and incompetent. He is likely a fraud, as evidenced by his guarded and unknown past. He is incapable of leadership, honesty or management. Virtually every one of his policy initiatives has been harmful to the economy and country. His intentions are clear, the degree to which he will be able to drive us further down the Road to Serfdom is not.
  2. An Incompetent Political Class – The political class attained power via Santa Claus economics, providing gifts to constituents in return for votes. Both parties are guilty. Politicians have conditioned themselves and their constituents to “free-lunch” governance. Few know how to govern in any other fashion. Most are indistinguishable from prostitutes — vote for me and I will do “that” for you. Both parties want to preserve the welfare-warfare State, disagreeing merely on the means of doing so.
  3. An Incorrect Paradigm – The Keynesian model of spend and spend has been good for politicians but disastrous for the economy. Over time, it has encouraged loose credit, overspending and living beyond our means. The failures are obvious to all but Statists and so-called Keynesian economists.  The political class cannot stop “free lunches” without suffering severe political consequences. Hence, the abuses will continue until resources are exhausted. Like Rome of old, we will soon run out of bread and circuses.
  4. An Unhappy Ending – Current economic problems cannot be mitigated or solved without incurring another Great Depression. Whether it is preceded by a deflationary collapse or a hyperinflationary blow-off is moot. The ending is inevitable and as more people understand this ending, they take more extreme steps to protect themselves — spending ratchets back, savings increases and businesses refuse to engage in new investment or hiring.
  5. A Dangerous Prelude to the Ending – Government is insolvent. It would be bankrupt without Federal Reserve Quantitative Easing. As a cornered, wounded animal will do anything to survive, so will Government. Does that mean confiscatory tax rates, capital controls, IRA investments forced into Treasury Bonds, “excess profits” taxes, a national sales tax, etc. etc.? It could mean any or all of these and more. Government will not roll over. It will do whatever it can to continue, regardless of how illegal, immoral, unethical or harmful it may be for the country.

Weimar America: I. It’s starting

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I have been flabbergasted by the lag between the price of crude oil, now at $108, and the cost of certain Canadian junior and intermediate oil companies, whose share prices have not kept up with commodity prices.  The market seems to be saying, “Hey, I’ve seen this trick before.  I buy the oil companies, thinking I can take advantage of oil prices, and then the price goes down and I am left holding a bag of money-losing companies.”  Well that could be true.  But then again, this could be the start of Weimar America.

In Weimar Germany, when hyperinflation started, people initially slowed down their buying of consumer goods because they felt that the prices weren’t normal, and that they should soon fall back to some level of sanity.  But instead, prices continued to rise.  Thus, they were forced to pay higher prices.  They soon learned that the time to buy was immediately after receiving money.  One of my professors who was a boy during Weimar Germany recounted how, the moment his parents were paid, he had to rush with their money to the market before the prices went up.

Now this is happening all around us.  I know that Ben Bernanke is saying that high prices are due to commodities, and that they will come back down.  But I doubt that you can come up with a single time that he’s ever made an accurate prediction. Here are some signs that Weimar America is now here.

(1) Car prices:  I bought a RAV4 in February because the price hadn’t changed in over a year and because Toyota Canada offered me free 36 month financing.  I felt that car prices would be going up because of commodity prices.  The earthquake in Japan has shut down parts factories and now production will cease in Toyota’s North American plants.  Similar shut downs will likely occur to other manufacturers around the world who depend on parts from Japan.  Supply will go down and this will cause car prices in the near term to increase steeply.  But don’t expect prices to go down once those Japanese factories are back online.  This is a catalyst for pushing prices steeper, where they must go.

(2) Oil prices:  The crisis in Libya and in other oil producing countries has lead to $108 WTI and $121 Brent.  The crises are not going away, because many are caused by instability due to food inflation.  Don’t expect crude to come back down in price.

(3) Precious metal prices:  Despite those who call gold a bubble, gold seems to have found support at $1400.  Silver has been experiencing unreal gains.  Investors who want to have some exposure to physical metal would do well to establish a starting position lest prices don’t come back down.

(4) Flight of capital:  Wegelin & Co., a Swiss bank that caters to wealthy clients with beaucoup bucks to invest is leaving the United States and has written up a eight page, double column, writ of divorce, entitled, “Farewell America“, explaining that the new bank regulations that the Obama led government has put into place are not worth the trouble.  Besides, they say, the USA is now in a major debt situation that it can’t get out of because (1) Foreign creditors are now decreasing their net debt to the US; (2) the US is running its entitlement programs as a ponzi scheme; and (3) Federal Reserve Bank is monetizing the Federal debt.  They are recommending that their clients completely leave the United States.  They won’t be coming back until things are fixed, if then.

Here is a salient excerpt from “Farewell America”:

The sensibilities of their own capital market: this is what the smart guys in the IRS have very probably failed to take into account. Their onesided regulatory proposals, focused on maximizing the tax take, are based on the entirely unproblematic and undisputed attractiveness of the USA as a place of investment for investors from all over the world. We believe this assumption to be utterly wrong. Why?

A glance at the USA’s debt situation suffices to show that apart from oil, there is really only one element of strategic importance that the USA will need in the coming years: capital. The (declared) public debt – national, state and community – amounted to some 70 percent of GDP in 2008. With the absorption of further debt in the wake of the financial crisis, by 2014 the level of explicit debt is likely to be significantly above 100 percent of GDP. By then the interest will have doubled from around 10 percent of total public revenue to around 20 percent, on moderate assumptions.

This is generally well known. What is generally less well known is that in the USA too, as in so many ailing European states, this explicit perspective reveals less than half the truth about what has been implicitly promised by the state in the way of future benefits. Correctly accounted – that is, as probable future payment flows discounted to present values – the picture would look a good deal bleaker. There are studies, such as the one by the Frankfurt Institute in November 2008, that reckon with a total level of debt for the USA of up to 600 percent (!) of GDP.

April 7 is my “Farewell America” date.

Money in Ancient Egypt

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In my study of gold, I’ve tried to find out something about the metal in the most ancient texts.  In doing so, I googled “Gold in Egypt”, and the first hit was a aldokkan.com that made the following claims about ancient Egypt:

The Egyptian government did not maintain or needed any gold treasury, civil servants were paid in food and gifts, money did not exist until the Ptolemaic Period.

The general population did not use any gold in their daily life, and the metal had no economic importance for them.

J. T. McGee has urged  me not to believe everything I read on the Internet, and so I’d better verify the above claims.  The first text that I read that would suggest that money existed in Egypt is Genesis 47:14 (RSV):  “And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, for the grain which they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.”  The term for money is keseph (כֶּסֶף), silver, and many ancient Near Eastern texts refer to the monetary use of silver, often measured in shekels–though apparently this was before the invention of coins.  So money existed in Egypt at the time of Joseph many hundreds of years before the Ptolemaic period.

For those skeptical of the historic worth of Genesis, in The Journey of Wen-Amon to Phoenicia (J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET), 25-29), a text dating to the 11th century BC, Wen-Amon travels from Egypt to Phoenicia to buy timber, but has his gold and silver stolen while harbored at Dor to buy provisions.  So clearly, silver and gold had already become money in international trade.  In The Expulsion of the Hyksos (ANET 233-234; 15th cent. BC) , a relatively common ship’s captain recounts his military exploits for which he received on seven occasions a reward of gold.  It would appear from these texts that gold was monetized in ancient Egypt, in the sense that it served as: (1) payment; (2) intermediary of trade; (3) store of value.

Why Warren Buffet is wrong about gold

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NB: This post first appeared at Beating the Index.  To read or add to the comments and discussion of this post please go here.

Following the controversial Warren Buffett on Gold Investing article, I thought it would be interesting to read a different opinion on gold.  I asked my fellow blogger and gold investor Peter from the Righteous Investor if he would like to provide an alternative view on gold investing and he kindly accepted. Thank you Peter for providing us with the view from the other side.

Money is a commodity which serves both as an intermediate of trade and a store of wealth.  Money must have the following characteristics to function properly: limited quantity, fungible, portable, available.

An increase in the money supply without a corresponding increase in production of goods and services leads to inflation; inflation of the money supply leads to price increases in the following order:  (i) commodities; (ii) consumer prices; (iii) cost of labor.  Inflation therefore results in a de facto garnishing of wages.  Thus, if a government sells debt which its central bank then monetizes (i.e., quantitative easing), then government spending benefits recipients through doing irreparable harm to savers and wage earners.  Thus, if possible, retail investors must protect themselves from this harm.

Humankind has used gold and silver as money since the dawn of history.  History has shown that gold is too rare and valuable to function as the only money, for the gold standard has led in the past to scarcity, making money too little available to common people. I’ve seen first hand how scarcity of money has lead to serious problems in the Central African Republic, where the local currency is tied to the Euro, which benefits international commerce but doesn’t really help the people on the street to conduct their daily transactions because there are too few small bills and coins.  The gold standard can also lead to this sort of scarcity and that is why in the late 19th century, there were many advocates who wanted to monetize silver.  Nevertheless, the great advantage of precious metals over paper currency is the inability of a government or a central bank to create it at a whim, and therefore they are far less susceptible to inflation.

Warren Buffett’s advice about gold has had a profound effect on retail investors.  He advocates common shares in stocks as better than gold; ironically, one of the most famous articles on how companies do poorly during times of a high inflation was written by none other than Buffett himself ( “How inflation swindles the equity investor”).  So he knows very well that stocks provide little protection from inflation.  So what are retail investors supposed to do?  They can’t buy bonds or common stocks, and in Buffett’s opinion, they are speculating if they buy precious metals. But I ask, why should Buffett care?  Remember, he’s an insurance salesman and he is out to get your money.  He himself has greatly benefited from the bailouts and the monetization of the US Federal debt.  I don’t think he has the best interest of ordinary investors in mind.  And I am not alone in this opinion.

Why there is no gold bubble

An investor, particularly the value investor, must seek to avoid overpriced assets.  Value investors want to find undervalued, underappreciated investments.  There are some pretty strong reasons to believe that precious metals are oversold and not overbought:

  1. Not that much global wealth is invested in gold (see Eric Sprott and Andrew Morris).
  2. There are too many anti-gold bugs.  Despite the performance of gold in the last ten years, there are still many who, like Buffett, do not understand why it is attractive.  There is also an entire school of economics, the Keynesians, who consider gold a “barbaric relic”, and this school has an enormous influence on governments, universities, and the media.  Keynesians have been adamantly opposed to gold and silver money, because it prevents them from manipulating and controlling the economy through monetary policy.
  3. Gold is just keeping up with other commodities and is also tracking the increase of the Federal Reserve money base.  The real bubble is not gold but the US dollar.
  4. Unallocated gold and gold derivatives make up an enormous and extraordinary portion of the supply of gold in the market.  Certain banks have supplied unallocated gold certificates on a fractional reserve basis to their customers (see this explanation by Avery Goodman).  It is difficult to say how much paper gold there is, but GATA’s Adrian Douglas has estimated that there is a 40 (or as high as 100) to one ratio of paper to physical gold.  This is the crux of the matter.  If and when a physical gold run occurs we could see gold jump to 40x the current price in a few days.  For this reason, every prudent value investor should invest in some physical gold and avoid all paper gold derivatives like the plague.  The same is true of silver, but according to analysts such as Eric Sprott and the National Inflation Association, the paper to physical silver ratio is much higher than it is for gold.  This is an important warning:  Do not believe any author who says there is a gold bubble but doesn’t deal with the question of unallocated gold.  In the end, the collapse of the unallocated gold, which is so deceptively co-mingled into the gold market, may become the financial disaster of the century, eclipsing the sub-prime mortgage crisis in its wake.

How I make money from the sector

The gold sector is not safe because of its great volatility.  Since I took my first position in 2006, gold has traded in the range of $600-$1400 per ounce, and gold mining companies have experienced an even greater range of prices.  So it is inadvisable to put all of one’s saving into precious metals in a single day.  The volatility, on the other hand, lends itself to the possibility of a profitable trading scheme.  So my strategy consists of both a base position of shares that I am holding for the long haul, and the trade itself.

(1) Base position:  I started five years ago by establishing a position in Barrick Gold at CDN $33.50.  I’ve never sold those shares.  I have also averaged down, when possible  (e.g., with NGD), to establish my current position.  Here are my current positions that I have accumulated over the last five years, followed by the average cost price:

Barrick Gold (CDN $34.185; +48%), Detour Gold (CDN $14.25; +121%), Lake Shore Gold (CDN $3.41; +19%), and New Gold (CDN $1.94; +471%), Sprott Physical Gold Trust (US $12.24; +2.5%)and Sprott Physical Silver Trust (US $12.65; +37%).

Gold and silver coins and bullion must be stored in a safe place, so I wouldn’t own any unless I believed that the economic collapse was imminent.  Therefore, the Sprott physical gold and silver trusts are a means of having direct exposure to the physical metal without having to worry about being robbed.

(2) Trading:  (a) I used to trade gold mining stocks, especially ABX and NGD.  I would try to buy on dips and take profits as enthusiasm picked up.  (b) One year ago, I started to sell put options because it was safer than taking long positions, though it would reduce the upside potential of my positions.  I have been selling these puts (in ABX, GG, NGD and DGC) since 2010.  I do this trading on the US market whenever possible.  I was of the conviction that QE would cause the mining companies at very least to remain static in value vis-à-vis the US dollar, and indeed, only one out of the multiple positions that I’ve taken in put options has ever been assigned.  I try to sell the puts on dips and I will occasionally buy them back if they make considerable gains in a short period of time.

P. W. Dunn holds a PhD in theology, has taught biblical studies at the undergraduate and master’s level in Africa and Canada, and now is a DIY investor who publishes his ideas about investing and how it relates to Christianity at theRighteous Investor.  His other posts on gold can be read here.

To read the comments and discussion of this post please go here.

The price of a real estate in gold

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The Daily Reckoning has a chart showing that nominal gains in housing since 1913 has been in the neighborhood of 4.4% per annum.  Take the following example:

5561 Keith Ave Oakland, CA  1913- $5,750; 2011 ; $843,500.  = 14,595%

But what happens if we price the house in gold which was $18.93 per ounce in 1913 and $1435 today ?

5561 Keith Ave Oakland, CA  1913-303 oz gold ; 2011-587 oz gold = 93%

That’s on the high end of the scale.  Suppose we took another house on the low end:

28 Sanford St. Trenton NJ  1913-$3,600 ; 2011 $200,500 = 5469%

28 Sanford St. Trenton NJ  1913-190 oz gold ; 2011-140 oz gold = -26%

The nominal gain in the 28 Sanford house over 100 years was 5469%, but the real gain as measured in gold is -26%.  This is a remarkable consideration.  In my view, what it really means is that those investment advisors (e.g., James Altucher) who say that buying a house to live in is not an “investment” have been absolutely correct.  It is likely a relatively good store of value, as compared to the dollar, but even that really depends on the location of the house.  If a house is bought in a thriving industrial metropolis but ends up in a ghost town like Detroit, real estate is a very bad investment indeed, in the long run.

I would contend finally that home owners often win in this game because they have access to a low interest debt product, a mortgage.  The interest paid, the maintenance on the house, insurance and property tax, the main expenses of the house, are roughly equivalent to or less than what one would pay in rent.  The significant advantage of borrowing a large sum today and paying it off over the course of time is that the dollars borrowed are worth more than the dollars paid, because inflation, which has been more common than deflation over the last 100 years, benefits debtors.

But real estate as an investment gives the impression of phenomenal gains; but as measured in gold, these gains are far less dramatic.  However, in some cases, owning a home may protect the investor from robbery via inflation.

Just for fun, I’ll do the same with my house:

Price paid in 1997 = CDN $200,000 ; 2011 – CDN$400,000 = 100%

Price paid in 1997 = 404 oz gold; 2011 = 287 oz gold = -29%

I conclude that my house has had phenomenal nominal gains in the last 14 years, but no serious real gains in that same period.