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At 14:35 Eastern the Dow is down an even 1,000 (abt. 2.5%). NASDAQ down 607 (abt. 3.6%). Gold is up about $37 on the day.

The dems and the media will blame Trump.

Edited to add: The S&P is currently down 3.3%. At a "Level 1" drop of 7% trading is paused for 15 minutes. If it gets to--heaven forbid--a 20% drop all trading is halted for the day.

Rolls of 1-ounce gold coins?!

I think a roll of silver dollars is 20 of 'em. So one roll of 20 1-ounce gold coins would come in at around $44,000 or more today.

Yeah; no. Any gold I buy won't weigh enough to impede my swimming. At all. One ounce equals the weight of about 28 standard paperclips. I'd never be able to own enough paperclips to even begin to slow me down...

Thanks for the info, folks. I was kinda sorta half-joking...but now I'm looking at it more seriously. Not that I have much money to worry about, but the speed at which the buying power of the dollar has nosedived the past four years plus the conversation about the very real possibility of a multi-pronged banking crisis (as opposed to the essentially single-sector residential mortgage-driven Obama recession)...well...

And thanks, Tom, for the U.S. Coins and Jewelry info. A visit may be in the future.

In addition to regular ol' money, I guess there's zombie apocalypse money, earthquake/hurricane money, and stop-the-inflation-madness money.

In a TEOTWAWKI apocalypse, I'm thinkin' ammo is gonna be at least one of the transactional staples. That's one reason I'm loath to sell off some of mine even if I'm not shooting as frequently as I used to. For example, back around 2010 I stocked up on new .45 ACP FMJ range ammo from a major manufacturer for $10.49 per box of 50. The same ammo today lists for $23.99 at Midway USA.

But that isn't very practical earthquake/hurricane money. If it's just that gas stations are dry and banks are closed for 10 days, trying to barter with a neighbor using some Prvi Partisan 5.56 ain't really gonna be a typical thing.

I try to keep a relatively small amount of cash on hand--equivalent to about a month's income--but I've just watched that devalue by 19.9% from sittin' there stagnant while Uncle Joe's campaign machine touts Bidenomics.

I'd thought I might want to steer clear of coins since I don't know anything at all about numismatics and thought the mark-ups might be as much about the coin itself as the material it's made of. But maybe the smaller items like the 1/10 ounce gold coins commodity pieces might make sense here. If we start going the way of Zimbabwe and the exchange rate for the dollar begins to plummet, having small coins with a gold-content value of a few hundred dollars (in today's money) might not be a bad idea...as opposed to 1-ounce bullion which is currently over $2,200 per. Easier to trade/exchange the smaller item.

As for stop-the-inflation-madness, I think that may be where the bullion bars could come in. For "liquid" and "FDIC secured" (in quotation marks in case we have a for-real banking collapse) savings accounts, Bankrate shows, of their top picks for money market accounts, a current average APY of 4.38%. But just 2 years ago, in April 2022, the U.S. Money Market Treasury Yield was a paltry 0.08% compared to 5.33% today. And it was below 1% from April 2020 all the way through July 2022 when it finally climbed to 1.58%. So that sure as heck hasn't kept up with Biden's 19.9% aggregate inflation since January 2021.

The Price of Gold

Gold was $1,835.40 per ounce as of January 8, 2021, and Biden's inauguration. Today, it closed at $2,254.80 per ounce. Since Biden took office, gold is up $419.40 per ounce, or 22.85%.

The Value of a Dollar

One dollar as of the beginning of 2021 would today be worth $1.20, the result of a 19.9% cumulative inflation under Bidenomics. Across the board, everything is costing us 19.9% more than it did just over three years ago.

So the value of the dollar has decreased by 19.9% while the price of gold has gone up 22.85%. Ten, 1-ounce gold bars purchased for $18,354 in January 2021 would sell for $22,548 today...while your initial cash outlay of $18,354, if left in your pocket, would today have the spending power of just $14,701.55.

I can shift some of my IRA into gold futures, of course, but in the end all that is just paper, just data records. If name-your-investment-firm-here does a Sam Bankman Fried crash-and-burn, you're left trying to find a way to recover your money. On the other hand, with physical bullion you have the matter of storing it securely...and if the bank's doors close having it in a safety deposit box could get iffy. But another great thing about guns is that they usually mean just about the most secure and fire-proof residential safes you can buy without engineering an at-home bank vault. And one ounce of gold is awfully darned small.

Gives me some stuff to think about. If/when I pay a visit to U.S. Coins and Jewelry in Houston, I'll report back.

Anybody know how to buy actual, physical gold and silver with the least possible coinage/commission overhead?

surprise_i'm_armed wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 5:48 pm Another angle to consider, with regard to banking issues, is the high and rising number of vehicle loan defaults.

And not just vehicle loans. My wife has a friend whose daughter is what I guess you'd call a "recovery agent." She's not real estate licensed--evidently you don't need to be for this--and what she does is help families whose houses have gone into foreclosure recover the balances owed them after the house sells at auction; she keeps a percentage of that recovery as her fee. I wondered if that was really a valid job niche. As a response, my wife told me yesterday that the woman had, this week alone, targeted a total of 54 new foreclosures as sales leads in a 2-mile radius in the Copperfield Area, just about 10 miles from we live.

That number in a limited area in a decent part of town shocked me. I gather what's happening is a compound effect of residual COVID-shutdown employment difficulties, high inflation, high interest rates, and little available cash (and probably declining credit ratings) on the part of any potential buyers. In other words, it isn't like the Obama recession where banks were giving people loans that left them upside down in their houses with high adjustable mortgage rates, but that Bidenomics and big increases in insurance and other costs are at a tipping point for more families who were making ends meet when Uncle Joe took office, and now can't balance the monthly books, have driven up their credit card debt, and can't find any buyers out there for their homes.

Dunno if this is an actual trend, but it seems logical that it could be. We all know the unemployment numbers are a false indicator when it comes to under-employment, and that the base inflation rate is also bogus when you look at the real-world value of a dollar. The cumulative rate of inflation since just 2020 is 18.6% (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), but the administration never talks about the cumulative effects, only how inflation markers are doing since the previous ones...so long as they paint the president and the Fed in a good light. But today, you have to spend $1.19 to buy the same stuff as you did for $1 at the end of 2020.

In the past decade, the cumulative inflation effect has been 31.8%. So just to keep up and break even, someone earning $60K a year in 2013 would have to be making $79,080 today. From 2013 through Biden's inauguration, cumulative inflation was 13.2%. So he's managed to add 18.6% to that in just three years. We may be in for a bumpy ride; I doubt there'll be a quick recovery from this.