Monday, October 8, 2007

Why Don't People Care About This?

I've been a Gold investor for a long time. My buddy Tucker even dubbed it, "My Precious," because I talk about it like my man Golum from Lord of the Rings.






It's true, I love the Precious. I love the precious because the Dollar is slowly being debased. Check out this chart -- Dollar vs. Canadian Dollar.










Or this one, the Dollar vs. the Euro. Ouch!





I just don't understand why people don't care about ruining one of our country's greatest assets -- our currency. A weak currency put us at the mercy of our creditors - China, Japan and pretty much every other trading partner of ours. A weak dollar means it takes more dollars to buy what you need or want. That leads to inflation folks, plain and simple.

The New Yorker covered this issue a bit last week. I always enjoy James Surowieki's financial opinions and explanations but in this article he tries to rationalize the problem away. His hypothesis is that because America is such a big market, firms will be hesitant to raise prices, for fear of losing market share in such a big market. That sounds great on paper, until those firms get tired of not making money and decide to raise the prices. By the tone of the article, I'm not even sure Surowieki even believes his own argument.

I'm grateful he brought the issue to our attention though. It's something that should be discussed openly. I don't want to return to the late 70's with the 20% annual interest rates. Do you?

While we discuss it, maybe you should pickup some of the Precious.