Showing posts with label About Gold - An Opinioniated Article Against the Majority. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About Gold - An Opinioniated Article Against the Majority. Show all posts

Friday, March 20, 2009

An invisible tax...Cash is crap!

With the yet again recent move by the US Feds to increase the money supply by buying up mortgage backed securities..we vomited when we heard that news. The US is in a big mess...it seems they are operating in an environment where every action they take is a struggle between politics and pure economics logic. Don't get us wrong...we think what the Feds are doing are logical from a public administration standpoint, but it is disastrous from an economics point. Anyway, SGDividends is ultra bearish on the US dollar and thats our personal opinion. It just makes perfect sense.

In layman speak, the above chart is basically showing how fast and furious the US Feds have been buying securities ( mortage-backed,treasuries, e.t.c). When the US Feds buy securities, they use US dollars to pay for it, therefore, effectively increasing the money supply into the system. Don't you think the spike is kinda scary?

To understand what gibberish we are talking about, one needs to understand the purchasing power of cash . It refers to the amount of real goods and services that a person can buy with say $1 fiat money. Therefore, its not correct to measure whether one has become wealtheir by looking at one's bank account, its more important to see how much goods and services one can buy. See the second chart above.

A bit on the history of money so that one can have a firmer grasp on why we say the USD dollar is crumbling and appreciate the situation better. ( Anyway, who says history is a useless subject in school...we will punch you . Its has helped many people make serious money.. )

Fiat money ( the paper money) used to be backed by Gold. So simply , USD$1 is backed by 2 pieces of Gold held in the Central Bank. By doing this, there was a system in place that imposed discipline on the government and prevented them from printing too much money. Think about it, one's money then was actually backed up by something REAL and PRECIOUS. In 1971, the US government abandoned the above system, which means money can be printed wantonly as it is no longer backed up my ANYTHING. Doesn't it make you wary of that lousy piece of "Legal Tender" paper. When the US government increases money, its actually an invisible tax on especially those people who do not receive that money. Its similar to a company stock. When the board of directors issue shares to their employees or insiders, it is dilutive and those shareholders not receiving these shares actually now owns a smaller percentage of the company.

Ok that was just some rant. Think the only money we will keep now is the money in our EZ link cards and Minimum $500 dollars in our POSB bank for daily liquidity needs. Cash is crap..buy assets. Ok so we wrote an article about 1-2 months back regarding Gold...since its a hedge against inflation...well we are still not buying into Gold though....just don't feel like it.

Important: The objective of the articles in this blog is to set you thinking about the company before you invest your hard-earned money. Do not invest solely based on this article. Unlike House or Instituitional Analysts who have to maintain relations with corporations due to investment banking relations, generating commissions,e.t.c, SGDividends say things as it is, factually. Unlike Analyst who have to be "uptight" and "cheem", we make it simplified and cheapskate. -The Vigilante Investor, SGDividends Team

Saturday, January 10, 2009

About Gold - An Opinioniated Article Against the Majority

We met an old finance lecturer today and boy does he look old. He told us to buy Gold because the value of the US Dollar is forecasted to decline in the long run and Gold is deemed to be inversely related to the USD dollar. Should we listen to him? Yes, we agree with him that the US Dollar is highly likely to decline, but still should we buy Gold? As Indians are particularly fond of Gold, we decided to go to Mustafa Centre to immerse ourselves in the big jewellery shops they have there where one would feel like they are in Gold Wonderland, with the precious metal glittering all around you. We spoke to the staff there and all we remember is " Buy Gold".

We decided to go back to our garage to be a keyboard warrior to do some research on the internet and most signs point us to buy Gold. Great!
Lets look at the charts. Gold has indeed risen extraordinarily,especially since 2005 onwards. The known factors that affect Gold are the following:
1) US Dollar - If the value of the US dollar is declining due to inflation or the Government printing too much money, Gold will go up.

2) Demand of Jewellery - Higher jewellery demand = higher Gold Price


3)Ease of buying and selling Gold - Due to more and more Gold ETFs, e.t.c. As when one makes things easy for people to buy and sell, people will trade more.

The combination of the above 3 factors should suffice to explain the rapid increase in Gold Prices from 2005 to 2008. So let us see what Warren Buffet has to say about Gold:

It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."

As usual, as we don't follow blindly to opinions unless substantiated with data and facts ( who cares if he is warren buffet or Jim Rogers or Obama or Hu Jintao or Mother Theresa), we decided to check Wikipedia to find out more about Gold and its uses.
According to Wikipedia, Uses of Gold ( in addition to store of value and Jewellery) are the following :

1)Medicine - used as dental fillings, used as conductive coating in electron beam microscope, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis

2) Food and drink - Gold leaves in drink

3) Electronics - generally, electrical contacts due to its high conductivity.

Frankly, the above uses of Gold, in our opinion, are lame. Do we really need to drink Gold Leaves and just how many people actually drink Gold Leaves? Dental fillings can actually be grouped under Jewellery, a luxury good and just how many people have dental fillings and how much Gold is needed for a dental filling? And how about Gold use due to its conductivity? Lets look at the table of conductivity for various metals( see below), again from Wikipedia. Silver and copper are better conductors of electricity than Gold. So Gold does not seem to have much of an "economic moat" for its use as a good electrical conductor.The only valid use for Gold, therefore, is definitely as a "culturally accepted" store of value as it is really quite a useless metal. And "culturally accepted" things are quite fluffy. Read more on the "culturally accepted" tulip flower in the mid-1630s where a tulip bulb can be used to buy a house.

So will one make money by buying Gold?Quite possibly yes because of the inverse correlation between Gold Price and the US dollar ( see chart below) and the US dollar value is highly likely to go down, but we rather forgo this opportunity as we don't like things without any fundamental underlying demand other than its demand just hinging on the fact that it is culturally accepted. Furthermore, Gold's supply is generally constant as it does not spoil and not generally consumed ( just look at the lame uses above). Compare this with other commodities, say oil, where the supply is common sensically dwindling as its always constantly consumed while demand is fundamentally increasing in the long run. Based on this, basic economics of demand and supply states that Gold is a inferior investment than oil, for example.

To be fair to the Gold Proponents (Majority), here is a link to a website that explains why Gold is worth investing:
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_02/hommel102802.html

Demand Breakdown for Gold ( added on 11 Jan 2008)

Important: The objective of the articles in this blog is to set you thinking about the company before you invest your hard-earned money. Do not invest solely based on this article. Unlike House or Instituitional Analysts who have to maintain relations with corporations due to investment banking relations, generating commissions,e.t.c, SGDividends say things as it is, factually. Unlike Analyst who have to be "uptight" and "cheem", we make it simplified and cheapskate. -The Vigilante Investor, SGDividends Team