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[personal profile] jducoeur
Those who are nervous about the markets and contemplating pushing their money into gold might do well to take a look at yesterday's article in the Motley Fool. Suffice it to say, they make the point that, while gold tends to look good in the short run, it's generally a poor investment in the longer term. And most people are pretty bad at figuring out when the short term starts turning into the long.

Looking at it, it's pretty clear to me that gold is currently in the middle of a bubble, and getting steadily more over-valued. Piling out of one bubble into another is probably not the best strategy...

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 05:01 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aneirin-awenyd.livejournal.com
Unless the dollar loses all its value.

Which is a possibility.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 10:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] aneirin-awenyd.livejournal.com
I think it depends on whom you listen to and what you want to believe. :)

I think we are going to go through wrenching changes as a society, and I think they are not far off. I think we are in for quite a rude transformation. I think we are now in a period of deflation. And if I could afford to have investments, I would hold gold and silver (always physical, never notional).

But I agree that the signs are confusing, and that is why I say it's all in whom you listen to.

My source for most info is www.chrismartenson.com, but you probably already knew that.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 05:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] redsquirrel.livejournal.com
Actually it occurs to me that if you are investing for long term and can afford to wait it out this would be an excellent time to invest in the stock market. There's a huge panic mentality going on and people are fleeing it in droves, depressing prices across the market. With a little research it shouldn't be hard to find companies out there that are fundamentally sound that will make it through the bad times of the next few years. Because the economy is cyclical and bad times really don't last forever and I think that eventually we'll make it through, optimist that I am.

I could be completely off-base because I'm certainly not deeply versed in the subject though I have been doing some reading. I have a working hypothesis about the size of this whole economic problem and that it's a function of the Information Revolution. The ease of communication has allowed an an enormous concentration of capital sloshing around the globe in what's become a very small market. The people managing this are chasing the highest returns for this huge lump of capital. Being people, they tend to chase in the same direction - herd mentality, you know.

Because this lump of capital is so big, it distorts any sector it lands in. Rather the way global warming is causing more "extreme weather." It excites the system because it adds more energy to that chaotic system. The money managers have no idea how to handle these feedback loops. It's too new and the economy, like the weather, is too chaotic a system to be fully understood. Throw deregulation on top of that, allowing that huge lump of capital to slosh where it will and you're going to get the natural boom-and-bust cycles of the economy - magnified.
(Drat, I don't know if that was very lucid. But I don't feel like taking it apart and rewriting it so I'll just have to hope you can pick out the sense in it.)

All of which comes 'round to saying that I think this is a cyclical downturn and eventually there will be a cyclical upturn. If you can wait it out long enough, there are probably some real bargains out there - stocks, like houses were overvalued during the bubble, now they're likely undervalued. People need places to live and they need what a lot of companies sell. The market will eventually (and I do stress eventually) rebound.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 05:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] redsquirrel.livejournal.com
Oh, and yes, I think some of that big lump is sloshing toward gold right now. I wonder where it will slosh next when the resultant gold and existing commodities bubbles burst, as have stocks and real estate? Any ideas?

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 07:01 pm (UTC)
ext_104661: (Default)
From: [identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com
"The interesting question this leads to is whether people will eventually learn from the mistake."

Nope. Individual persons may learn this sort of thing, but "people", in aggregate, cannot. Evolution has (mis-)wired us so that we are not rational economic actors. This is why "there's a sucker born every minute." Sadly, learning not to be a sucker takes *considerably* longer than a minute, and most people never manage it at all. Hence, most of the population, at any given time, are suckers.

For "people" to learn this sort of thing will take either or both of:
*) a fundamental improvement in the default wiring of our intuitions
*) a substantial increase in our average speed of learning

I think both of these are possible, and valuable, but neither one is notably happening during this economic cycle.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 12:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] metahacker.livejournal.com
How about *) an improvement in our formal education?

I mean, our instincts tell us to steal, cheat, lie, in some cases rape, and other things that we have successfully eliminated from the majority of polite society -- or which have attendant penalties to balance them out. Why not the same with panicky investing?

Or maybe that's wishful thinking.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 03:20 pm (UTC)
ext_104661: (Default)
From: [identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com
"How about *) an improvement in our formal education?"

IMAO, only if that *results* in "*) a substantial increase in our average speed of learning". Which is possible, but I think would require, at minimum, a massive revolution in teaching methods. I don't see us getting there incrementally from our current pedagogy.

"our instincts tell us to steal, cheat, lie, in some cases rape, and other things"

I think that's an over-simplification. The evolutionarily stable (mostly) mix is that most people are cooperatively social, but a few sociopaths exploit the system. I'm not sure that that has significantly changed. We may (maybe) have reduced the expression of sociopathy among low-power members of society, but high-powered sociopaths are as powerful and abusive as they have ever been.

[I have occasionally played around with an SF Utopia scenario based on the existence of an objective test for sociopathy. That invention leads to the *actual* War to End Wars, as all the sociopaths make their last attempts to maintain control. But once the cooperative societies are immune to infection by defaulters, they are hugely more productive, and can't be beaten in the long term. The end result is a society where severe sociopaths are isolated in asylums, and mild ones are prevented from occupying positions of power.]

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 09:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] meiczyslaw.livejournal.com
The evolutionarily stable (mostly) mix is that most people are cooperatively social, but a few sociopaths exploit the system.

Much of the current research reinforces this notion. Humans tend to generate a natural high when they help other people.

There are a couple of exceptions: for one, humans apparently really like vengence. We're willing to suffer a lot to get back at someone we think deserves it.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 03:28 pm (UTC)
ext_104661: (Default)
From: [identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com
There are still people alive who remember the Great Depression viscerally, and learned a great deal from that one event. It got 'baked' into the culture, in a number of ways, but sadly all impermanent.

"the visceral lesson gets lost a generation or so after it is learned. At that point, though, it tends to get ritualized into the culture."

I don't see how the second sentence follows from the first. Indeed, the first sentence seems to refute the second. If the lesson is lost, how does it get ritualized?

And even if such knowledge does get ritualized, rituals themselves are not very stable on a societal level over a period of generations. Historically, in some periods, some rituals lasted a long time (or at least it appears that way from my modern perspective). But the modern western world is one in which 'ritual' and 'tradition' are in near-constant flux.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 09:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] meiczyslaw.livejournal.com
If the lesson is lost, how does it get ritualized?

In the old days, the power structures were organized in such a way that the folks at the top didn't forget. They had the time to think about how to fix the problem, and then they passed the solution down to the masses.

This is where you get the prohibitions against pork rooted in the Middle East. Other people could eat pork and not get sick, so you can't just simply say, "don't eat pork, it'll make you sick," when it obviously doesn't make Egyptians sick. No, the priests had to say, "God doesn't want you eating that. It's unclean."

But if there is no God, then the pigs must not be unclean! we say, and then end up with trichinosis.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 10:32 pm (UTC)
ext_104661: (Default)
From: [identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com
My point, though, is that that sort of strong, effective religious injunction doesn't seem to get created any more. Ideologies are too much in flux. The folks in power over the last few decades didn't forget the Great Depression; but they decided that the laws designed to prevent its recurrence no longer fit their ideology.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 11:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] meiczyslaw.livejournal.com
I'm not arguing the point -- the question you asked did not seem rhetorical.

I could also have brought up how family-oriented the professions were, and how family traditions could be used in place of religious ones.

(There was good reason for the nobility to be hereditary -- without a serious education system, the only way you learned the complex job of governing would be from your predecessor, one of your parents.)

We've broken these constraints to create flexibility and innovate, but we haven't replaced them with anything, thereby losing institutional memory.

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-09 08:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kathryn-aka-kat.livejournal.com
Bah, you forget to take into account that gold has other things to recommend it. When it becomes worth less than you paid, you can still make much nicer jewelry out of it than you can out of stock certificates? ;-)

(no subject)

Date: 2008-10-10 12:30 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] metahacker.livejournal.com
(blink)

Why would anyone buy gold *now*? It's clearly at or near the top of its bubble. I guess if you wanted to do short-term speculation before everyone starts selling their gold to buy cheap dollars; but that's a risky route.

Or do I not think like the man in the street, the one who's about to sell low and then buy high later?

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