EPTGold, Worth So Much, And Yet, Worth So Little.. - Page 2
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writer22816
United States5775 Posts
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Meta
United States6226 Posts
In all seriousness, I agree. Worthless metal if not for the human need for shiny trinkets. | ||
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Keyboard Warrior
United States1178 Posts
On December 18 2011 14:07 Plexa wrote: Ask a mule lol exactly | ||
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UniversalSnip
9871 Posts
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Sadistx
Zimbabwe5568 Posts
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Angel_
United States1617 Posts
ALSO ALSO. It's used for outer fucking space travel. | ||
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Black[CAT]
Malaysia2589 Posts
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Romantic
United States1844 Posts
Buying gold is kinda like betting on the possibility the world falls apart. In that situation I'd rather have canned food any gasoline at any rate. | ||
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guN-viCe
United States687 Posts
I read that gold has better longevity because it does not form oxides or sulfides. If that's true, I can see why it would be valuable. | ||
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Azzur
Australia6260 Posts
However, for my own 2-cents, I think it's somewhat ridiculous that people dig up the earth for a relatively useless metal just to store them in bank vaults as a reserve currency. | ||
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OmniEulogy
Canada6600 Posts
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3clipse
Canada2555 Posts
Also it's shiny. On December 18 2011 16:07 Romantic wrote: It is always slightly funny when people bash fiat currencies, which have value because people accept it has value, then propose using gold which only has value because people accept it has value. More of an anti-government than pro-gold argument. Yeah, that's a terrible argument. A reasonable argument, however, is that such a system makes it far more difficult for a country to undertake expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, which many small government advocates criticize because they tend to cause inflation. | ||
zatic
Zurich15365 Posts
I made lots of money with gold this year I don't care if it doesn't make sense. | ||
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Foolishness
United States3044 Posts
On December 18 2011 14:58 UniversalSnip wrote: My favorite is when people say to shift assets to gold in times of uncertainty because gold is 'safer' than money, as if the belief gold is valuable is less mutable than the belief money is valuable. Gold is just as likely to do poorly as anything else. There's a lot of sheer hucksterism around the value of gold, people will show you a chart with the value of gold moving up over decades (which is in itself a meaningless indicator of it's future value), if you moved the graph back another few years you'd see all that growth is just recovery from a decline! Saying gold is 'safer' than money is definitely a misnomer, but people are correct to shift assets towards gold. When the value of currency becomes uncertain (or if people expect high inflation) people will shift their assets from cash into other things, since cash will not have as high of a value. Gold just happens to be one of them (others being things like bonds, money market funds, etc). So of course in recent years the price of gold has skyrocketed because people are shifting their assets into things besides currency (demand increases so the price rises). Why gold? Simply put, gold is one of the most liquid assets (liquid means it's easy to sell. Gold and stocks are liquid, a race horse or a house is illiquid). The semi-financial crisis in recent years showed us that government bonds and money market funds can dry up, despite these being supremely liquid as well. These bonds and money market funds also bear a credit risk, and the past four years have shown that this risk can be dangerous (for example in Europe the credit quality of government bonds deteriorated very rapidly as rating agencies downgraded bonds). So when your other choices for a liquid asset to put your money in are just as uncertain, gold starts to look like a good safe-haven. That's why in the US you keep seeing those commercials for places that want to buy your scrap gold, etc. | ||
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targ
Malaysia445 Posts
The answer as to why gold has been historically seen as valuable is that due to its scarcity and durability, it has been chosen as a key medium of exchange for other goods which are more useful, such as tools or food. If we did not have such a medium of exchange to indicate value, we would have to go back to the barter system, which obviously has many shortcomings. Thus the value of gold is created by mankind's collective agreement to take a step above the barter system. If society were to collapse back to the barter system, say in a post-apocalyptic world, gold would be worthless until society developed enough complexity to wish to use something to denote value again. | ||
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Xiron
Germany1233 Posts
On December 18 2011 18:29 targ wrote: I agree that gold is intrinsically not very valuable. The answer as to why gold has been historically seen as valuable is that due to its scarcity and durability, it has been chosen as a key medium of exchange for other goods which are more useful, such as tools or food. If we did not have such a medium of exchange to indicate value, we would have to go back to the barter system, which obviously has many shortcomings. Thus the value of gold is created by mankind's collective agreement to take a step above the barter system. If society were to collapse back to the barter system, say in a post-apocalyptic world, gold would be worthless until society developed enough complexity to wish to use something to denote value again. Also gold is shiny. Me like shiny things. | ||
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