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The bigger fool theory

  
  Education
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Cartoon inspired by this article written by Peter Tasker in the Financial Times
“The inconvenient truth is that gold is not really an investment at all. Since it generates no return and thus has no fundamental value, the same arguments can be used to justify any price – $500 an ounce or $5,000. Gold buyers are simply trusting in the bigger fool theory – that someone else will take it off their hands at a higher price. They are speculating, not investing, and like all speculators what they are speculating on is the speculations of other speculators. Packaging it in an exchange-traded fund makes no difference.“

Gold 75% Underowned In 20 Years, Or Exter's Pyramid For Gen X/Y

  
Analysis, Economy, Education
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Kedrosky has posted an informative chart from JPM’s Michael Cembalest indicating that ownership of gold in dilutable terms (aka dollars), as a portion of global financial assets has declined from17% in 1982 to just 4% in 2009. And even thought the price of gold has double in the time period, as has the amount of investible gold, the massive expansion in all other dollar-denominated assets has drowned out the true worth of gold. Were gold to have kept a constant proportion-to-financial asset ratio over the years, the price of gold would have to be well over $5,000/ounce.

Of course, the chart above pales in comparison with the true Exter pyramid, which incorporates all those wonderful JPM/Goldman inventions known as derivatives, amounting to $1.8 quadrillion, which certainly did not exist in 1982. If one were to factor the above table  to include this Exter securitized credit money as well, then the true constant worth of gold would be well north of $10,000.

Inspirational Quotes

  
Education, Life
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1. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein

2. “Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now.” – Wallace Wattles

3. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

4. “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering the attitudes of his mind.” – William James

5. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin

6. “There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela

7. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” – Robert Frost

8. “You’ve got to win in your mind before you win in your life.” – John Addison

9. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin

10. “An ounce of doing things is worth a pound of theorizing.” – Wallace Wattles

11. “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

12. “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.” – Stephen Covey

13. “The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.” – Joseph Joubert

14. ”Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – Winston Churchill

15. “Don’t wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel Stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself.” – Dara Henderson

16. “Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” – Jim Rohn

17. “Vision without action is just a dream, action without vision just passes the time, vision with action can change the world” – Nelson Mandela

18. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T.S. Eliot

19. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde

20. “Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose yours.” – Paulo Coelho

21. “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” – John F. Kennedy

22. “I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” – James Joyce

23. “I have learned that it’s not WHAT I have in my life but WHO I have in my life that counts.” – Unknown

24. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau

25. “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” – Jim Rohn (more…)

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