Still arguing about the past. The past is done with. I'm trying to give people an avenue by which to understand a situation which is quickly evolving. You do what you think is best, I'm not here for petty arguments or to advise anyone.
Let's see what next week brings. I suppose you just dismissed my proposition about Italian gold reserves potentially becoming a head wind on the gold price. I'm on record as saying gold as a physical asset will outperform but that doesn't mean its price will go up under the circumstances which are evolving. If the gold price falls instead of rising which most investors expect then the cost structures of the miners will come under the microscope as they did during the GFC and companies with debt will be less favoured. There is an old saying in markets, they can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Look at the chart I posted about the size of various markets. Gold is just a pretty small cog in the wheels of what is a complicated and interconnected financial system. The gold bugs like Jim Rickards miss one fundamental point about gold, its utility as an insurance policy against other asset classes failing comes directly from one single property of gold, its absolute tangible nature, ie that it can't be transmuted into anything else expect through nuclear reactions. Once it becomes the only safe haven play and no matter how much its price may rise, there is not enough of it to go around, which is the very thing that defeats it as the ultimate safe haven. A tangible asset must be tangible by definition, if you can't get enough of it to hold any real quantity it loses the fundamental thing that differentiated it in the first place and that's what will happen to gold if everybody wants it (apart from it being made illegal well before that). It will run into this fundamental barrier that arises through its scarcity. The world's money markets are way to big to have a gold standard, ie to be backed by gold. If because of its scarcity they try and divide gold up using a derivative of some kind it becomes just as worthless as the fiat currencies that the rush to gold would be trying to escape. No better than bitcoin in that scenario which is also based on the concept of intangible scarcity. Intangible scarcity is a logical contradiction in my opinion.
Gold is not as important as some commentators lead people to believe. It has its place as an alternative when your currency is losing value, as is the case with the $A and other currencies around the world but if it becomes a real threat to the USD or $A it will be made illegal, the laws are already in place in Australia.
NST's costs have been rising. Consider the alternative I pose where gold prices start to fall. The only thing currently making NST attractive is the falling $A and that's falling because the Australian government is under the control of the banking cartels. In the current situation the government is totally out of its depth and will cead decision making to foreign banking interests. That's why such poor decisions are being made. They are currently just bailing out the top 10% like in the US, looking after themselves first. If they don't start looking after the people soon their glaring mistakes will be laid bare for all to see and all their edifices will continue falling. A bubble is bubble, it was always bound to collapse. People prepared to invest in a bubble do so at their own risk. I wasn't prepared to be part of it even it went on for another little bit. The big bell rang and I listened. Let's leave it there shall we. My proposition is that markets have a long way to fall and nothing will be spared and that NST is still being valued by a failing bankster cartle and that all bankster PEs on equity markets will realign to the bottom when it is reached. Your proposition, it seems, is that NST is well priced and positioned to take advantage of the rising $A gold price. Let's just give it time. Does the orthodox thinking work or does the out of the box thinking work. Either way I not going to lose any money as I'm not invested. The fear of not making money is not a driver for me?Esh
(20min delay)