streetTRACKS Gold Shares (GLD)

All Comments on GLD

  • commenter
    Reader851
    Oct 12 03:08 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    We need to keep in mind, as we try to reason our way through this issue, that we are in the beginning stage of a paradigm shift. It is too early to see the new paradigm that will emerge.

    That said, it is not too early to project that the new paradigm will include much more involvement by central governments in capital markets.

    The consequences of that for gold, for currencies, for the entire range of asset classes, cannot be known.

    The author is as clueless as the rest. Is his analysis right this time? Is it wrong? Who knows? His predictive record is so poor that it is essentially a random walk to act on his analysis.

    And please, to say I majored in economics in college in order to establish my credentials is such a howler that it takes my breath away. What kind of sophomoric web site is this, to let such people have a prominent role on it?


    Reply
  • commenter
    moonbat1775
    Oct 12 02:56 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    A silver dollar is a joy to behold. Reply
  • commenter
    User 277473
    Oct 12 02:53 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    Nonesense! Silver and Gold are in a free fall right now YET try and buy an ounce of silver at any where near the spot price. Also, everywhere I go like APMEX and other precious metal sites are all sold out and can't deliver for WEEKS. This is a no brainer people.

    M A N I P U L A T I O N !

    Hey, all of you who consider Gold and Silver worthless go over to Ebay and see what plain old JUNK SILVER is getting. HA HA HA a pox on all you precious metal haters.

    Kyle     Reply
  • commenter
    chux08
    Oct 12 02:51 AM
    Gold Prices Keep Getting Fishier [view article]
    Just do the opposite of CLH and you'll be fine. Besides being a blood relative of Allen Greenspan, I've heard this guy aspires to do some printing of his own. A few more weeks and he can join the paper parade of losers where all fiat currencies eventually reside...you remember the dust bin of history, don't you?? Wave bye-bye. The dollar's going down with the ship and I'd trade every last one of them for gold or silver, I could care less which as either would wind up being more valuable than anything made of paper and will also NEVER fall to no/zero value either. You guys who say the dollar will eventually prevail are going to get a refresher course in history and on basic economics (as we all will) in the next few weeks or months and we can all watch the fiat paper currency return to it's true intrinsic value - zero. Hey, that's a good line....I wonder if anybody's s ever said that yet?? :-) Reply
  • commenter
    moonbat1775
    Oct 12 02:43 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    brewtul, well said sir!

    Dang, there's some smart people on this site!

    (Don't let it go to your head, it might displace some brains.)     Reply
  • commenter
    WeiHan
    Oct 12 02:24 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    Ghostbuster,

    Other commodities all have their disadvantages comapred to gold. For instance, oil isn't stable and will combust easily and chemically altered. Same goes to copper and many other metals. Moreover, they bulky to store.

    Why isn't gold standard financial system not flexible enough for our global economy? I'll see a gold standard financial system more stable and eliminates unnecessary man-made fluctuation which is risk. This in turn eliminates necessity for hedging and other complicated instruments that takes care (but they don't) of this part of the risk.     Reply
  • commenter
    brewtul
    Oct 12 02:08 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    People are muddying up a very simple concept. The power to print money given to a privileged few will always result in debasement of that currency. Study the fall of the Roman Empire - it began in debasing their gold coinage with lead and using the inflated currency to support their military. It worked for a while until the currency was so debased that it was no longer an accepted store of value. The fall from grace of their currency that ensued mirrored their fall from power.

    All currencies are initially backed by something but when the power to create money is unhinged from that collateral abuse is inevitable. Unbridled greed leads to printing money which is nothing but debt, also called leverage. Great - makes a mint on the way up, as long as assets keep inflating. The masses see assets rising and buy assuming that "trees grow to the sky". But that leverage desrtoys even faster on the way down (fear is a more powerful emotion than greed or euphoria)

    The reason gold is the ultimate store of value is because it can't be printed or destroyed. Yes, it's inflexible. That's the point. It constrains the natural tendency for humans to exhibit herd behaviour at the extremes of greed and panic. You see what happens when human emotion is left unchecked. Trillions of dollars of wealth evaporated in a few months, millions of baby boomers facing retirment severely underfunded if not destitute. Is that what proponents of fiat currency think is desireable? How about Weimar Germany? How about Zimbabwe? If printing money was the way to prosperity Zimbabwe would be the wealthiest nation on earth. Damping, not amplification, of human impulses is what is needed.     Reply
  • commenter
    Paolo103
    Oct 12 02:00 AM
    Examining the "Unprecedented Demand" for Gold Eagle Coins [view article]
    The best explanation I've heard thus far is that banks, this week needed liquidity to cover their losses and that they (banks), sold-off metals to gain liquidity. If true, this would go a long way toward explaning Friday's metal freefall. Gains will keep coming... "Gold elevator up... and I agree it will be somewhere between 3 and 4k. Reply
  • commenter
    ghostbuster
    Oct 12 01:37 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    Wei Han,
    Yes you are right excessive fiat currencies lead to speculation and bubbles, but the real question is why a fiat currency system should be left unchecked in the first place? This is the real question, and after this crisis we will a have to build a fiat system that will probably be more controlled than before. We are facing this problem not because there is a fiat system but because the US Central bank surrendered its responsibilities to private hands the so call shadow banking system
    (hedge funds, Siv, etc.) which then were able to manipulate the fiat system to inflate all kind of assets and blow bubbles.

    A fiat system is not bad per se, and in my view an international fiat system should never be put in private hands, it is a public good. The problem take roots in the US ideology where everything should be run by private entities, there is no reason that this should happen. The next amended fiat system will be more stronger as a result but there is no way that we will ever go back to a gold system simply because it would not provide the kind of flexibility that a fiat system has to accomodate the world economy. Having said that why do you want a monetary system absolutely based on gold? And why not a system based on oil/copper/molybdenum or whatever? Are those commodities useless? don't a barrel of oil has some value for you ?     Reply
  • commenter
    Celcius
    Oct 12 01:36 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    istartedi Gold is a store of value and there is plenty of it to back a currency. It worked well for decades. The only reason we left the Gold standard is because the Nixon administration printed excess dollars to finance the Vietnam war, and foreign governments redeemed these dollars for gold drawing down our gold reserve rapidly. Wars are highly inflationary just like now. The Bush administration with the Fed and the banking industry used low interest rates to create an artificial economic boom. This boom, an inflationary asset bubble, is trying to correct itself. However, we are now applying the same Keynesian methods that created the inflationary asset bubble to stabilize the economy via flooding liquidity into the banking system. We are creating another bubble. We need a gold standard, a fixed store of value, to prevent these asset bubbles that are purely speculative. If we don't have a depression from this economic meltdown then we will definitely have one from the massive bubble we are going to create with the 1.6+ trillion dollars that will be injected into the economy. We keep over steering the money supply like a car skidding on ice, and with each over steer we loose more control.

    I don't see gold as an investment just a store of wealth. A personal gold reserve just like central banks. Gold is also a store of labor. The labor cost to print a $1 bill and a $1000 dollar bill is the same, but the labor to produce 100 ounces of gold vs. 1 ounce is significant. And, that is the main problem with fiat currencies, they are so easy to debase.

    If this economic crisis causes the world to abandon the USD as the reserve currency then we should expect hyperinflation. And your printed money will be worthless.


    Reply
  • commenter
    moonbat1775
    Oct 12 01:36 AM
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    ghost,

    Many good thoughts you have written. But as I said I am not in favor of a gold standard or ANY government enforced standard. Competing currencies messy? Yes, for a while. A few favorite currencies would emerge; some based on gold, some based on silver, some similar to stock certificates.

    Don't give up on an completely fair money system. Competition and liberty are essential. Plus, I would argue that an unfair system is ultimately unstable as ours has proven to be. As a example, the poor may soon have ipods to listen to but not enough to eat. How has this perverse consequence arrived? Ans: Fractional reserve banking and a monopoly currency essentially steals from the poor and savers and "invests" for them by lending to businesses, for instance. Will those "investments"... always justly compensate those whose purchasing power was taken to make the "investments"...

    The thoughts I have expressed are not original. Ron Paul is in favor of competing currencies as are many other economists of the Austrian School. This is not a "baty" idea.


     Reply
  • commenter
    LCACM
    Oct 12 01:35 AM
    Congress Charges 'Commission', Culminates Decades of Mismanagement [view article]
    Not sure why the 700B check to help Paulson's friends should not be also considered as "pork barrel". If Cowboy Capitalism was the highly resilient economic system that Wall St, claimed it was, it would not have created this mess. The current crisis proves that the fundamental assumptions of the Cowboy Capitalists may be flawed, and need a closer examination. It hardly makes sense to hand them a 700B check without ovesight and caution. As Paulson/Bernanke did not warn the US government sufficiently in advance, say 3 months before, these two fellows advice is very suspect. When scientists/engineers are faced with facts that do not conform to theory, they reexamine the theory to see why it failed. MBAs in Finance need to take a similar approach, instead of being blinded by ideology.
    Reply
  • commenter
    Alan
    Brochstein
    Oct 12 01:25 AM
    My Website
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    It's late and I forgot to check that post - the first line should have stated that I asked them to check their "thesis" (not premise). Reply
  • commenter
    Alan
    Brochstein
    Oct 12 01:24 AM
    My Website
    Is Gold A Sucker's Bet? [view article]
    ghostbusters, thanks for contributing your thoughts. I wrote this article with the basic premise to ask gold bulls to check their premise. It makes little sense to me that anyone would want to own gold given what we know is going on. History is full of changing relationships. Stocks used to be perceived as riskier than bonds (true) and thus requiring dividend yields in excess of bond yields (yup, the stock investor got the earnings growth and the current income). Historically, equity prices rise a certain period of time after the Fed initially cuts rates (I wrote a year ago about how that wasn't going to happen this time). Healthcare stocks do well when the Fed is tightening, etc. Like a Pavlovian response, people bought gold as the dollar depreciated, etc.

    The game has changed! It's a global problem, not a domestic one. Another thing that has changed is the way we live, which I can tell you appreciate this point. Ludwig von Mises didn't email his theories to his cohorts in India to whom he was outsourcing the production of his books, if you know what I mean! I mentioned in the original article that the response to gold hitting $1000 was an around-the-world meltdown. Not of bonds, stocks or anything else - of gold itself, literally. Even here in the USA, pawn shops were flooded by a river of gold (Disclosure: I own EZPW as one of my largest holdings having replaced what I sold at 18 and then some from 14 down to 11+). If you go into a pawnshop, you begin to understand that gold is no different from used tools or used musical instruments. It USED to be different, and it still is apparently in the minds of some people, but the amount of gold globally relative to wealth in general is an odd-lot. The amount of gold held by monetary authorities is trivial relative to the currencies or the potential annual tax intake.

    Again, thanks for sharing your views...     Reply
  • commenter
    LCACM
    Oct 12 01:08 AM
    The Euro Shows Its Real Colors [view article]
    There is no choice for US and Europe other than to inflate their currencies. These economies are being devastated by the so called Free Trade ideology. Wall St has coined the word "Proctectionism&q... so that it can be used to label and ridicule those who propose a saner and Fairer Market. However, the same high priests propounding Free Markets and Cowboy Capitalism have no problem asking the US government to hand them a 700B check. The Free Market can be likened to an Airplane AutoPilot. AutoPilots do a good job of steering the plane when the human Pilot might be asleep at the wheel during long flights, howerver, the Pilot is supposed to take over the controls in treachorous situations such as landing, takeoff, engine fire etc. Deregulation of the last few years is similar to sending a plane full of passengers on a flight without a Pilot, because the Pilot might fall asleep at the controls. Reply
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