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Silver trades to $50 an ounce

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81–86 of 86 posts

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#81
post #44

When people are talking about inflation, what inflation statistic are they referring to? CPI has been below 3% since May 2024. Precious metals (silver, gold, platinum, palladium) have out-paced Bitcoin. USD:EUR hasn't gotten worse than 5-year lows, same with USD:GBP. I don't think these statistics support "money is fleeing the U.S." or "tariffs are causing runaway inflation", unless I'm missing something? You could p…

Grocery prices, utility bills, gas prices, insurance premiums, property taxes or rents all are part of the real coat of living. The political fairy tale that is the CPI stays low to avoid having to increase government payments for social security and the like.

When my mom and dad bought their home 50 years ago, they took out a mortgage to buy a home. My dad was a "light equipment operator" with the county road department. My dad's paycheck was their only income. They paid off the mortgage in 12 years on his salary alone, while raising three kids.

Today, the county road department still has a "light equipment operator" job and it pays about $52,000 per year. The house they bought 50 years ago is now worth $940k.

There's no way a couple with a single income of a "light equipment operator" could afford that house today.

In fact, even a light equipment operator's boss, the foreman/supervisor couldn't afford that home on today's wages. Maybe a light equipment operator's boss's boss, the a "superintendent of public works" would have enough income to afford the house that 50 years ago a light equipment operator was able to afford.

It really shows how an increasing percentage of the value of a worker's labor has been systematically extracted and transferred from workers to owners.

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#82

Gold and silver hitting all time highs, stock market at insane levels. We have an asset bubble even though interest rates are high. Why is this?

Wealth is becoming more and more concentrated at the top end of the distribution. Folks at the high end have a lower marginal propensity to consume, and thus invest more in assets. This increase in demand causes all assets to rise.

almost all wealth is cash flows from future labor income. Labor is just heavily leveraged on their own future labor. Kind of like AMD levering up on future gpu sales.

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#83

Gold and silver hitting all time highs, stock market at insane levels. We have an asset bubble even though interest rates are high. Why is this?

Because the numerator in all those fractions is the dollar, which is rapidly losing the worlds trust, as a store of value. Eventually we'll see what happens when you try to divide by zero.

It’s the same when you look at it in euros.

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#84
post #44

When people are talking about inflation, what inflation statistic are they referring to? CPI has been below 3% since May 2024. Precious metals (silver, gold, platinum, palladium) have out-paced Bitcoin. USD:EUR hasn't gotten worse than 5-year lows, same with USD:GBP. I don't think these statistics support "money is fleeing the U.S." or "tariffs are causing runaway inflation", unless I'm missing something? You could p…

Grocery prices, utility bills, gas prices, insurance premiums, property taxes or rents all are part of the real coat of living. The political fairy tale that is the CPI stays low to avoid having to increase government payments for social security and the like.

I agree with you that these have all risen in cost. All of those (excluding property tax) are included in CPI.

What inflation metric, in your opinion, accurately captures those costs?

To clarify, the CPI story is this: we had a period of high-inflation during COVID/the war in Ukraine and our recovery from COVID / reorganization of energy supply chain away from Russia. Now, we're back to normal-pace inflation. Since prices are a one-way ratchet, we're stuck on a new+higher plateau, but we're not still going up at the rate we were in 2021-2022.

Is there an inflation metric that contradicts this narrative?

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more "real" because it has value that doesn't decrease arbitrarily when the people in power decide to print a couple trillion to deal with the latest hot topic.

The value of silver has also been decreasing arbitrarily as traders trade it! Just like real live dollar bills! That's literally what the article is about, Silver is finally making it back to prices (in real dollar bill terms) not seen for 14 years.

Yes, the prices of all things vary according to the market supply and demand. That's very different from the government creating 25% inflation in 5 years.

Re: Silver trades to $50 an ounce

#86

Something cool about Silver and Gold is that we have such a long history of how they translate to labor. https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2013/Hurriyet_May_2_2... > In the era of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.), a Roman centurion was paid 15,000 sestertii. Given that one gold aureus equaled 1,000 sestertii and given there was eight grams of gold in an aureus, the pay comes to 38.58 ounces of gold Today, 3…

How do we get to 38oz of gold? 15k sestertii at 8g per 1k would be 120g of gold (aka 4.25oz), right? Also, where do the silver numbers come from? Interesting approach!

Knowing $125 price per gram of gold it's funny they need to convert to non-metric system to calculate price.

One aureus is approximately $1000 of gold value. And as a collectible item it is worth $3k-10k.

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