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Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

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Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#171

Post by refurb »

bsder wrote: post #143
ggm wrote: post #8

I'd love to see an economists take on the value to a consumer of holding gold in this form, at the price. Investment gold is usually kept in vault, and you trade ownership arms length. Direct gold ownership is rife with risks: fineness, substitutions and overpriced purchase. Yes, you can always sell at a mall gold trader but that's way way off market price. So it's an inflation hedge with a lot of cost and risk and d…

I'm really left scratching my head about people who buy gold to hold physically and personally rather than as an investment. In any situation where it might be relevant, how are you going to sell your gold? For example, if you bought one of those bars right now , how would you then sell that bar again right now ? And, if things really are completely collapsing, nobody wants gold . They'll want something much more imm…

Right now it’s not hard to sell. There are reputable gold traders who will pay cash, usually at market prices (minus some margin).

But presumably if the shit hits the fan and the USD is worthless, it’s a form of trade.

I don’t disagree not a great one. My biggest issue is if you want to buy food what do you do with a $2,000 piece of gold? Buy $2000 in food? You can’t really divide it up (a random chunk of gold is much less valuable than a minted coin).

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#172

Post by robertlagrant »

defrost wrote: post #136
didntcheck wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Protests are meant to be disruptive". It was a very effective protest, and from my memory almost entirely peaceful, which is way more than can be said of other protests in 2020-21. Honking horns somehow caused more media outrage than actual riots It was surprising to see how quickly people turned around into saying that blue collar workers uniting and striking was a bad thing (with several suggestions that they be f…

> blue collar workers uniting and striking don't get to close off access to and from work sites for days and weeks on end, nor do they get to block customers. > protesting government authoritarianism is A-OK in my book - but blocking intersections and pissing off fellow citizens and stopping their free travel is not. The line crossed, in the view of many people who might have otherwise supported them, was the nature…

> The line crossed, in the view of many people who might have otherwise supported them, was the nature of their protest

Am I understanding this right? They think the government should step in and freeze the bank accounts of people who haven't been tried or found guilty of a crime, and who just inconvenienced them?

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#173

Post by cmcaleer »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #46
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see it happening right now in Argentina: the local currency is worthless, and people are flocking to ... US Dollars. Not gold, not bitcoins, but good old benjamins. So gold isn't even a good inflation hedge: if you walked the streets of a failing economy (pick one: Argentina, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, there's plenty more) and tried to exchange gold for goods, you're not gonna get far (and will probably get mugged…

Why do you think that people in Argentina are flocking to Dollar and not to Bitcoin or Gold? When I look at the search trends in Argentina, I see Bitcoin in a very volatile longterm uptrend, Gold in a longterm downtrend and the Dollar being constantly a distant third: https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=AR&q=go... Over the 20 years which the Peso has been devaluing, Bitcoin has outpaced the others by…

A very direct, relatively reliable indicator we could look at to see if this has happened at all anywhere recently is the gold premium in China, which has gold import restrictions. Just days ago people were willing to pay ~$100/oz over the international mark price, so there are people willing to spend >5% above the mark on a high volume asset in order to have a physical hedge in the event of a catastrophic failure of the yuan.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-27/chinese-g...

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#174

Post by refurb »

defrost wrote: post #166
refurb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So clearly you would have supported the same things - suspension of Charter/Constitutional rights, during the BLM protests when businesses were burnt down?

Please don't paraphrase and assume my position, it weakens your position to strawman in that manner. Depends on the circumstances - which specific protest in the US continuously occupied and blocked off major transport thoroughfares in the USofA for a month?

I’m not paraphrasing and assuming, I’m drawing conclusions from your statements.

What do you mean “blocked off transport”? Is that the only form of protest deserving of harsh measures?

Do you not think rioting in commercial centers and setting fire to businesses would rise to a similar level as blocking downtown streets as was done in Ottawa?

Clearly you feel blocking city streets is sufficient, so burning down businesses must as well?

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#175

Post by kawhah »

defrost wrote: post #41
xcdzvyn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that Perth Mint considers "Australian legal tender" a feature of a $6,000 coin

It's a 'feature' 49 coins @ $200 each is less than $10,000 in legal tender and doesn't have to be declared as a cash transaction or carry on cash. Also handy for reducing transfer taxes on house purchases - you can have a higly qualified QC (fancy lawyer) swear affidavits that they witnessed the purchase of a house for an absurdly low amount and therefore the required tax is correct despite being so low.

I don't think I'll be retaining you as my tax advisor.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#176

Post by Dylan16807 »

didntcheck wrote: post #124
Dylan16807 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the rights, I'm asking about the supporting. I heard about freezes for people doing the protesting (including organizing). But that's an extremely different thing from supporting the free speech rights of the protesters.

OK, the government debanked people for organizing peaceful protests against them. That's hardly reassuring

When the accusation was thought crime, I find it pretty reassuring.

Sometimes governments jail people for protests, and locking a bank account seems similarly or slightly less bad to me. Not great but not newly worrying.

Or is it that you don't consider direct organizational efforts to be a subset of taking part in a protest? I'm generally fine with it, I think. Do you have anyone in particular in mind that was in this role but shouldn't count?

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#177

Post by oblio »

noduerme wrote: post #111
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see it happening right now in Argentina: the local currency is worthless, and people are flocking to ... US Dollars. Not gold, not bitcoins, but good old benjamins. So gold isn't even a good inflation hedge: if you walked the streets of a failing economy (pick one: Argentina, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, there's plenty more) and tried to exchange gold for goods, you're not gonna get far (and will probably get mugged…

Not exactly. I just sent this link to my (Argentine) friends with a different observation. My observation was: The United States is starting to look like Argentina. You must understand: Most Americans are not accustomed to shoving a third party currency under their mattress, or buying physical gold. The phenomenon of hyperinflation is foreign to them, and there's a steep learning curve. The actual significance of thi…

> The phenomenon of hyperinflation is foreign to them, and there's a steep learning curve.

LOL. What the US has is in no way, shape, or form hyperinflation. I've lived in a place with hyperinflation and less than 10% ain't it, chief :-)

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#178

Post by kawhah »

injeolmi_love wrote: post #29
quickthrower2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a store of value works better when the world is using it as a reserve, but they don’t anymore so it is just like any other limited supply commodity and doesn’t necessarily need to go up in price due to inflation. It only will go up due to emotion.

In 2022 alone, central banks purchased 1,136 tons of gold[1]. The us government holds over $500b in gold[2]. Gold is still valuable as a reserve asset because it’s highly liquid, demanded by every economy, and has low inflation. Central banks frequently do settle balances between each other by transferring gold (often just involve moving the gold from one part of a warehouse in London to another part). Gold hasn’t go…

It is not true that central banks "frequently" settle balances between each other by transferring gold. This is an event rare enough that it would typically be reported in financial newspapers if it happened.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#179

Post by defrost »

robertlagrant wrote: post #172
defrost wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blue collar workers uniting and striking don't get to close off access to and from work sites for days and weeks on end, nor do they get to block customers. > protesting government authoritarianism is A-OK in my book - but blocking intersections and pissing off fellow citizens and stopping their free travel is not. The line crossed, in the view of many people who might have otherwise supported them, was the nature…

> The line crossed, in the view of many people who might have otherwise supported them, was the nature of their protest Am I understanding this right? They think the government should step in and freeze the bank accounts of people who haven't been tried or found guilty of a crime, and who just inconvenienced them?

Not the personal accounts of people - the accounts used to land donations in to fund the continued blockading of public thoroughfares.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#180

Post by oblio »

hliyan wrote: post #73
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people keep thinking that a financial meltdown means societal meltdown. There's plenty of places where the economy is or has already melted down even right now -- Sri Lanka, Argentina, Venezuela, etc. We can observe what happens when political institutions completely and utterly collapse, because it's happened multiple times already . What happens is not immediate apocalypse where people riot a…

Sri Lankan here. I personally experienced this last year and was very surprised. We Sri Lankans love to criticise ourselves for our wonky moral compasses, so when the early protests started, I stocked up on food and installed an extra CCTV camera, expecting widespread riots and looting. They never came. There were many organised protests, and protesters did clash with riot police around government buildings, but peop…

> I stocked up on food and installed an extra CCTV camera, expecting widespread riots and looting. They never came.

Turns out, most people aren't psychos and at one extreme, some would rather end themselves than hurt others.

> I still think if food became really scarce, selfish, violent behaviour would have emerged.

That does emerge, as you said, but it needs to be SUPER extreme. By SUPER extreme I mean gulag or shipwrecked crew on an island with no food. In human history these scenarios are very rare, probably since the dawn of agriculture.

And, I mean, we could implode that badly, but we're talking regressing 3+ thousands of years. It looks more like a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland or Earth being hit by an asteroid than a "regular" economic meltdown.

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