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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

#301

Post by icepat »

uptown wrote: post #218
kenneth wrote: post #216

I used to buy gold bullion as a sneaky way to get credit card points on the cheap (and then use them for first class flights around the world). You could usually do the trade profitably and quickly and quite safely with insured shipping via USPS. $50k at a time. It was a bit sketchy to have that much in bullion at home, and I quickly got bored of it. The things you do when you're young…

Who would you sell the bullion to to cash out?

Somehow when I was about 13 I ended up buying about 2k worth of silver in various places when spot was about $15 USD. One place was even an antique coin shop in my hometown. When spot went up to $20 a bit later, the same vendor bought it all off me at market price. Precious metals are a strangely easy thing to liquidate.

One of the strangest financial anecdotes of my life. To this day I wonder what the vendor thought seeing a literal child buying bars of silver bullion, then selling them at a 25% markup later.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#302

Post by colordrops »

542458 wrote: post #270
alephnerd wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN seems to have a lot of kooks these days, or maybe the kind of people who would push back have just stopped. I've seen a surprising amount of vaccine denialism, xenophobia, unsubstantiated pop Econ takes, Peter Zeihan bullshit, etc. YC should just cut the cord on this forum tbh. It's not about "Hackers" or "News" anymore.

Segments of HN have been predicting the imminent collapse of the US dollar for at least the last decade. One thing 10-years-ago HN had but today doesn’t is the constant predictions of the imminent collapse of the VC startup model in general, or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong threads these days. That said, you may be correct in that the voices have gotten louder. Also, the Covid conspiracy stuff drives me up the…

It's not because HN changed, but rather because conspiracy theory, especially the covid stuff, is no longer niche.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#303

Post by olalonde »

RandomLensman wrote: post #300
olalonde wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've used decades old dollar bills in SE Asia that have been pretty much detached from the US economy for decades and have held value better than bitcoin ever has. I'm not sure what makes you feel that way. Gold and Bitcoin are up against the dollar in the past decade, and by a significant margin. Bitcoin is up ~225x against the dollar. Gold is up ~50x against the dollar going back five decades. The US dollar is pr…

If you had bought something productive like the S&P500 50 years ago, would have outperformed gold easily. No-one wants to long-term just store value unproductively (which is also bad from a macro perspective).

> If you had bought something productive like the S&P500 50 years ago, would have outperformed gold

That's correct. Almost everything beats the US dollar (except other fiat currencies).

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#304

Post by noduerme »

pjc50 wrote: post #121
noduerme wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Argentina has 100% annual inflation and going up while the US has less than 10% and going down. The USD is not going anywhere spectacular, because there is no more stable country to flee to. The one thing that can reliably trigger inflation in almost any country is oil/gas shortages on the global market, and you can't hedge that with precious metals nor store a 20 year supply in your house.

>> the US has less than 10% and going down

First of all, there's no evidence it's going down. Secondly, 10% is a wild figure. That's far over the breach for the population to begin to alter their behaviour by either hoarding or spending.

My point was, the mentality of coping with even 10% inflation is very foreign to Americans. But it's a learned skill, and people will learn it. When they do, it will resemble Argentina during the 10% phases (2003-2012 for instance). That's not necessarily terrible if you're coming down from 100%, but it's a brand new experience that Americans haven't come around to.

And it does a lot of very weird things to your politics.

It makes everything more populist far-right or far-left than it would need to be otherwise. It feeds into conspiratorial thinking. It is a regressive tax.

10% is a HUGE regressive tax right now on American citizens, and it's kind of a miracle that they haven't rioted more.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#305

Post by ehsankia »

nwiswell wrote: post #122

This is strange, apparently they're selling at a significant loss? Current online price, $1930. Spot gold, $1872.59. So a little less than a $58 premium. My credit card gives me 2% back, and my Costco membership 2% on top of that, for a total of 4%. I assume that Costco probably pays a bit more than 2% for card processing, and of course they're the ones actually paying me the 2% back from the membership. So that's at…

Other than what the others have said about credit card fees, I thought in general the whole business plan of Costco was to basically sell things at nearly no profit, and make most of their money from the members fee.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#306

Post by Symmetry »

mistrial9 wrote: post #275
pjc50 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina has 100% annual inflation and going up while the US has less than 10% and going down. The USD is not going anywhere spectacular, because there is no more stable country to flee to. The one thing that can reliably trigger inflation in almost any country is oil/gas shortages on the global market, and you can't hedge that with precious metals nor store a 20 year supply in your house.

> the US has less than 10% if you read the plea from the Argentine above.. they say "peer networks to measure value" .. it implies that the entire inflation is NOT one single number. It is in sector by sector, with local "shadows" .. In the USA, it is housing obviously in large populated areas, but also health care and the cost of a University education. Those measures have climbed triple digits while yes, petrol and…

I don't believe you that the inflation rate for housing or education is at 100%. If you mean that there's been 100% inflation since some point in the past then, well, yes that's true but it's also true of every other good. But when we say that Argentina has 100% inflation it means that the nominal price of goods doubles every year.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#307

Post by osigurdson »

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 current monetary policy in the US seems unlikely to lead to hyperinflation.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#308

Post by satellite2 »

cpursley wrote: post #259
Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Locking someone’s bank account means you can’t pay your rent/mortgage (become homeless), can’t buy food, can’t purchase your medicine, can’t work.

Exactly, it's much worse on many accounts.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#309

Post by shyn3 »

Hacker News users are always wrong when it comes to things that matter. This is not going to age well.

Going to wait for gold to drop as that's what always happens with HN topics like Bitcoin and Tesla and DropBox and so many others.

The next year buy it at half and hold for 10 years seems guaranteed.

Funny how Americans who voted Biden in probably still think they have 10% inflation when Inflation is almost 40%.

Going to be fun.

Re: Costco gold bars are selling out within hours

#310

Post by silent_cal »

AdamN wrote: post #106

What's the real spread on these things (i.e. how much can you sell the gold for directly after you buy it)?

It's based on the current spot price. Depending on the form of the gold, you can sell very quickly to a trader at a little higher or lower than spot, I'd say 1-2%?. You'd get more if you sell directly to someone, but that's risky of course. Retailers sell at a premium above spot, around 3-4% for regular bullion and more for coins like American Eagles or Maple Leafs.
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