Finance Tips

If you pick up a newspaper, go online, listen to the radio or watch television these days, it’s hard not to catch a commercial for gold. They make some enticing claims:

“Gold has tripled in value since 2000…”

“It’s a safe haven for investors…”

“It’s outperformed the stock markets…”

“…and it’s never been worth zero.”

Historically, most of these facts are true. Go back far enough, before we placed a value on it as a commodity, it was actually worth zero: it had no value. Demand for gold – once upon a time – was so low compared to the abundance of it just ‘lying on the ground’ that it really had little or no value to anybody. Even as early as the Gold Rush, many prospectors found it lying above ground.

Here are some other very interesting facts about gold:

“You can’t eat it…”

“You can’t use it for heat…”

“You can’t make particularly good, warm clothing from it…”

“And, on occasion, governments have compulsorily recalled it.”

Therefore, in a world where the dollar is increasingly less stable and economies are still extremely wobbly, stimulus plans in the trillions of dollars are proving ineffective, unemployment is increasing at an alarming rate, and the civilized world is potentially headed back to the Stone Age, what does this all mean? Simple, we’d better get educated on how to engage in the age-old practice of bartering. Continue reading ‘Barter Better Than Gold?’ »