Testing Your Metal

Sometimes, for amusement, I pay attention to ads on the TV or radio. Especially the gold and silver ads. You see, gold is down. Quite a bit down. If you purchased gold back at its nadir in 1998, you'd have made a bundle. Unfortunately, you didn't, did you? Neither did I. Know why I didn't? Because gold is not all that great an investment. I watched it grow in value in the late 70's; peaking in 1980 and then dropping off... quickly. A funny thing happened just about the time that gold peaked back then... Silver followed.

Yesterday, I heard (for the umpteenth time, I think) about how the price of silver is "poised" to take off. It mentioned a couple of silver shortages, blaming these for the federal mint to temporarily stop minting some coins and for Apple to hold up production of one of its computers. This was followed by the claim that these shortages had hugely increased the demand for a silver coin (not an official coin, mind you, one they are having minted). In fact, it apparently increased the demand so much that they were now going to give purchasers of twenty of these coins an extra coin for free.

Think about that for a moment. The demand is so high that this company is going to give them away. What a great country!

Oh, by the way.... the price of silver is down.

And those silver shortages? The only ones reporting them are precious metal brokerages and the blogs that support them.