SS and Medicare are not debts. The US SC already ruled as such. Congress can erase them at the stroke of a pen, and has in the past.

Retirement benefits must, and so will, be cut. There are an infinite # of ways to address the problem - make people pay more, lower COLAs, remove the SS earnings cap, reduce payouts to rich people, raise the retirement age, make everyone pay more for healthcare, etc.

We are never going to have any trouble making the interest payments on our debt -- that's completely absurd. Like, Bizarro-world Superman fantasy-land.

Of course rates will go up from alltime record lows, that's not even news. That's so obvious it was on the cover of Duh Aficionado magazine.

It always amazes me how the silver bugs in this thread try to have it both ways -- if rates are ['too'] low, buy silver!! OMG TEH BERNANK IS PRINTIN DUH MOBNIEZ!

But if rates go up, Buy Silver! OMG IMMINENT DEFAULT OF US SOVEREIGN SOMETHING ARMAGEDDON USE DOLLARS FOR KINDLING!


Again, nothing you say has anything to do with the price of silver. It will continue to fall [over time] to the production cost of taking it out of the ground. That's fair value, no more, no less. I am happy to buy silver below the $8.80 or whatever the cost is if only as a diversifier. I am not against owning precious metals in your portfolio, but you can't overpay for them and you can't believe the ridiculous nonsense gold/silver bugs post here and elsewhere or you will end up in the poorhouse.

I wrote this about gold, but the argument is identical for silver:

Gold is valuable, is not money, costs money to store and insure, is significantly more common and slightly overpriced compared to platinum which has more usefulness both industrial and jewelry, and has *not* been a store of value the past 30 years.

Gold bugs merely assert it is a store of value. Over the past 3 decades you'd have been better off in stocks, long Treasuries, or corporates, or high-yield, or even money markets. Gold lost 85% in real terms from top to bottom.

Not long enough? Ok, I take your criticism and raise you 80 years of data. The S+P 500 is up 796% in real terms. Gold is up about 130%.

If you bought an ounce of gold in 1919, that would cost you $19.39 based on the London fixing. Today it's worth $1383. A 72x return.

If you bought a share of Coca-Cola in 1919, that would have cost you $40. Today that share of KO with reinvested dividends would be worth $9.8 MILLION DOLLARS. A 245,000x return!

Feel free to substitute GE or AT+T or Cigna or Tootsie Roll, or Hershey, or BoNY, or Wells or State Street, or cigarette firms, or Wrigley's; or Vanguard Wellington or MFS Fund or Putnam Investors Fund or CGM Fund or Fidelity Fund if you want to start in 1925 or 1930 or 1935.

Gold is a poor inflationary hedge, *especially* compared to stocks, which is how it has been marketed to investors.

Over the past 90 years there have been plenty of 'difficult times,' and yet gold has underperformed stocks by a VERY WIDE margin in the US. [And the UK. And I'm pretty sure in Switzerland and Canada also.]

If gold was back at $250 as it was during the Bubble 1.0 days, I would [and did, ftr] absolutely suggest it could play a role in your portfolio at sub-$300 prices. Central banks always get their massive sales wrong.

Out debt is 16-17T -- it will likely be $20/T when Obama's term is up.

If rates went to 5%, we'd owe about a trillion per year in interest on $20T, correct?

We currently spend $4 trillion a year, and bring in $3 trillion a year in revenue.

Where are we gonna find an extra trillion for interest?

Punish the savers by slashing off a zero in their digital money accounts?

aaaaaaand it's gone.

Read my post above. I explained what money is and the properties/features of money.

Gold and silver have been money for thousands of years. You saying that they are not money and that the dollar is money is kind of like someone saying the last decade is the warmest decade in recorded history so MMGW is definitely happening. Problem is recorded history goes back only to like 120 years and the planet 4 billion years old.


Also, comparing gold to silver is wrong. Gold doesn't have any industrial use at all really. Silver has uses in about 10,000 or so applications in industry.

Debt is the oldest form of money. The first currency were clay tablets. A man would approach a fishermen and promise him a spear for three fish. The man would sign a clay tablet for the fisherman to hold, which he could also transfer to others if he didn't want the spear. If he never produces a spear then the fisherman or owner of the clay tablet tells everyone in the village that the spearman's word is worthless. This would be a long run game theory disaster for anyone looking to get a free lunch. PM's or any fixed money supply are the anomaly when it comes to the history of money.

You still haven't explained how that has ever mattered when considering the prices of both gold and silver. Why do they follow almost identical growth charts if one is so much better than the other?

You think TPTB want gold and silver at their true free market prices? Sound money is their enemy.

You think silver's dollar price is REALLY $19?

Look at that chart above that I posted, in 1477 the purchasing power of silver in U.S dollars was 809$ Someone said I was insane for saying silver has a solid chance of being a once in a human history opportunity. Could you imagine having 1,000 oz of silver in your possession back in 1477? You would have been able to have orgies with 10+ hookers every single night for your entire life multiplied by 4 or 5 lifetimes. Today having 1,000 oz of silver in your possession would be the equivalent of poverty level yearly income.

How much does your average American make? Maybe $150 per day or so? Someone sitting in an office pushing papers and eating ho ho's while probably not doing anything worthwhile or creating any real wealth for society is making the equivalent of 7 or 8 oz os silver per day???? That just flies in the face of what reality is and has always been. Even today you have people in China and other parts of the world who are creating real wealth for society and they are making 2$ a day or the equivalent of 1 oz of silver every 2 weeks or so.

What about lawyers or insurance agents? How many of them do we have in the country? They are making even more money than average. They are providing zero real wealth for society while making artificially high incomes off the backs of the honest goods producing Americans via inflation.

If you think a very sharp reversal isn't coming at some point you are living in the clouds.

Silver looks like it's been going down consistently for a thousand years, only spiking lately (and now dropping again). The graph would indicate that it's a terrible long term investment, no? The graph of desirable land values for the last 700 years would consistently go up, I would think. Ownership of top businesses through stocks consistently goes up exponentially. Meanwhile, silver long term seems to consistently decline relative to every currency of the day, which makes it a terrible investment, no? On what basis are you arguing it's a good investment? The one graph you showed shows continuous decline over long time periods, and no major profits from even the most disruptive events in human history.

I think you aren't understanding why some people (including myself) "invest" in silver. If I wanted to invest to make more dollars and make those dollars over a short time frame (1-5 years), I would literally invest in breeding goldfish over speculating in silver. At least investing in goldfish I'll have maybe a 25% chance of breaking even.

I haven't read this entire thread, but it seems most silver bugs in this thread investing in silver are doing so to make more dollars as an investment, which is why you'll see some people who are anti-silver be like "oh I wonder where all those silver people are now, now that silver is at 19$" Well I think those people speculating in silver to make more dirty powder dollars are idiots. Silver is so volatile and such a small market, you have to be clinically insane to invest in it on a short term horizon. Makes more sense to go play craps IMO.

Go on the Kitco forums in the silver forum. A lot of the people on there buy because they reject the dollar and the system and they started rejecting it before I was even born and started scooping silver when it was at like 5$ ounce. I'm sure plenty of them easily have over 5k ounces in their possession and many of them didnt' even consider selling when it was at almost $50 a couple years ago.

I actually do not care at all where the silver price goes because I am buying the same number of ounces each week I don't care if the dollar price is at $45 or if it goes back down to $5. Sure, if it goes down to $5 that would mean I lose some of my purchasing power but not that much because I'd be dollar cost averaging it all the way back down to $8 or $5, and then at that point it has become a very good savings vehicle. Where I probably would have ended up spending the dollars that I put toward silver on stuff that I don't need to begin with, since it is much easier to spend your dollars when they are in a bank account versus locked up in a safe or hidden somewhere where you have to physically bring them to a coin shop.

You have to have a long term horizon with this, and if you DCA it at worst you don't lose that much at all and have a tremendous savings vehicle, with the potential of your purchasing power increasing by a lot to where you can get into real assets like real estate on the super cheap. You are right about stocks over the last 100 years, but that doesn't mean stocks are going to continue on the same path. I think the dow/gold ratio is headed for 1/1 or close to it in the future.

That is all very idealistic of you, but unless you see the US govt backing out of their promise (ie the dollar) within the next 5 years why wouldn't you wait until you have more purchasing power so you can fulfill your own plan of hoarding silver. It's cute to call the dollar dirty but your contention that the dollar price of silver going down makes no difference to you is ridiculous by your own standards. And that's all after we take all of your interesting to absurd assertions for granted.

You should reread just how many separate valid counters were raised against you IIT. Your words have absolutely no bearing on what an intelligent person should be doing with his purchasing power currently (I think you yourself agree to this as well) or the foreseeable future.

Silver_man, that actually makes sense.

However if that is your thesis, land ownership or productive assets seems to make even more sense, to me. You get returns similar to or better than stocks, a hedge against inflation and stock market crashes for the right businesses, and a way of consistently receiving whatever the currency of the day happens to be, which you have to admit is very useful for getting around in the world.

Also, if you reject the dollar, why not get into a highly liquid item like bitcoins? I can't imagine a scenario in 20 years where silver will be more useful or common as a currency than it is now. I can imagine bitcoins and similar items being far more useful and common.

What do you mean if I see the U.S. government backing out of their promise? The promise has already been broken. The dollar was a promise to pay in silver, and it has been broken. I have said this at least 5 times already.

The amount of actual silver available for investment has been estimated between 60 million to 600 million oz.
.

$50 trillion world bond market. $50 trillion world paper money supply.
That’s $100 trillion of paper money. The world derivatives market is worth $1,000 trillion now?

$1,000 trillion is more than a million times larger than 700 million ounces of silver.

It is IMPOOOOSSIBLE to exchange all the promises for payment. That is why the dollar is a lie.

I really don't give a crap about people's valid counter arguments, because they are brainwashed by the dollar and they don't know what money is. So their arguments hold no wait to me. My purchasing power will most certainly go up in the very long term, 2-3 decades. I don't care about 1-5 or even 10 years from now. It is just an absolute ridiculous joke to think a flimsy paper dollar is a good store of value. The dollar is failing as a store of value. PROMISES THAT CAN DEFAULT AND GO TO ZERO ARE NOT A STORE OF VALUE.

Bitcoins more useful than silver?

Industry strongly strongly disagrees.

No. Your statement "they've already broken their promise" has absolutely zero ramifications concerning my buying power unless you see a major collapse of the dollar within the foreseeable future. You are wrong to say so confidently that your buying power will be better off in 20 or 30 years than stock in the top businesses of that time.

You must assume an apocalyptic future for the US dollar/economy/status quo for your craziness to matter at all for how someone should use his buying power currently. I am confused why you don't see this simple fact.

Man if the Zombie Apocalyspe or the collapse of the financial system doesn't come, these silver guys are going to be legit pissed.

But seriously, why not invest in land? God it's got to be more lucrative than hoarding silver. Any silver bug that bought even modest farm land 20 years ago (since they've been hoarding metals that long) would have incredible wealth and diversity today, and far less variance.

That is pretty much the end game for a lot fo serious silver investors. But it is still too early. The silver/housing ratio needs to drop more. 4,500oz for a median priced American household? That is ridiculously high. It will come down to 1,500 all the way down to potentially 500oz for a median priced home. Imagine having 6 or 7k oz of silver in your stack and a median priced home going for 1,000oz of silver. Snatch up 5 or 6 homes all in cash, no mortgage. Your absolutely set, and Imagine if you DCA avg per oz over the yeas that you havre been converting to silver is in the teens when you make that transfer into those homes. You just made a ****ing killing.

You are so off. Serious silver investors aren't trying to get rich. I just told you, I don't give a crap where the price of silver goes, and to be honest, I kind of hope the system doesn't collapse in my lifetime even though things are so ****ing messed up and corrupt because of the lie that is the dollar.

It is funny...you rip on people who get silver because they reject the dollar and the corrupt system. Yet you think the dollar is great...why? What in the world is so great about a failing piece of paper?

Uh do you not remember the post you wrote 2 minutes before? You praised silver BC of how many houses you could buy. You said "You can make a ****ing killing" thats all that matters man why are you so dense. this is total incoherent trolling now. Good luck to you I'm done with this pointless argument

Silver_Man2 I think you tie silver to money way way too much. Times have changed. Nowadays, price of the silver is driven a lot by it's industrial uses. Only gold behaves more or less similar to the past in terms of store of value imho.

This the vast majority of the time. Even it wasn't qtr-end... fridays often become profit taking days so have to be careful trusting the price action under these circumstances.

You beat me to it, was going to say exactly that.

The dude can't be talked to, he's all over the map.

Dude, It's just a long term potential goal that has a realistic chance of happening, considering the fact that 4,500oz for a median priced American home is way too high.

People aren't converting their crumply dirty fraud dollars into silver to hopefully become a multi millionaire. They are doing it because they reject the dollar and the corrupt government that NEEDS you to believe the lie that is the dollar in order to keep their dishonest game going, it is probably more a peace of mind thing more than anything. If someone with a modest stack of 2,000oz is able to eventually pick up 1 or 2 houses free and clear with no mortgage that person isn't going to be "rich' by your definition of hasing a milbon dolarz but they will be by THEIR definition I am sure.

There are people out there who don't want to be robbed by TPTB so they reject and get out of the dollar. Good for them. And the fact that you people call them tinfoil hat wearing doomsday whatever, says more about your insecurities and blind trust in a ****ed up system that is ****ing you.

I guess you missed your chance then? When silver was at its peak housing was historically low and that would have been the time to convert all of that silver into houses. Since then housing has been creeping up and of course silver crashed. Better luck next time!

I'm not tying silver to money. Silver is money. No one here and most people don't know what money is. Silver does not circulate but that doesn't mean it is not money. Again...the words for silver and money are the same in many different languages. I mean...what are you people missing? Or what am I missing?

Nobody responded to my example earlier. Minimum wage was $1.25 or 5 SILVER quarters in the mid 60's. People today cry about how minimum wage needs to be higher because the poor people can't afford a living wage. Well, WTF are those 5 SILVER quarters worth today? About $25. But the minimum wage needs to be higher??? No, it is quite glaringly obvious with this example that the money needs to be fixed. Someone making minimum wage in 1964 is living the same as someone making about $25 dollars today.

Wouldn't be too crappy working at Mcdonalds for minimum wage if you were making $25 an hour now would it? Well, fix the money...pretty simple. Funny thing is, I bet a lot of you think minimum wage should be raised, well it wouldn't have to be raised if the dollar wasn't a complete fraud and was honest sound money.