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FlashlightOCD said:
Look under numismatic in your yellow pages. js mentioned Gold Eagles already but they are not as "pure" quality gold as the Canadian Maple Leaf. The Maple Leaf is a 9999 fine gold 1oz coin, I think it is as "Pure" of gold as you can buy at 99.99% and it looks amazing.
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Maple Leafs are pretty cool, I'll admit. It all depends on why you're buying gold in the first place. The maple leafs can never be circulated: they're too soft. If the monetary system crashes and an underground trade in gold and silver starts up, you're better off with US coins, and in any other case, Gold Eagles are as fungible as anything else or more so. They ARE bullion, and don't really have much numismatic value. You can find them on ebay, too, BTW, but there are some good sources on the web, and pawn shops can be good if you know your stuff when you walk in the door. Silver is probably a great investment at the moment, too, especially so called "junk" silver. In the past it was easy to get this stuff at 4 times face value. I don't know what it's doing at the moment.
When you hold a stack of silver dollars in your hand--the REAL dollar--then you know you have something, but what are these monopoly money papers we use? Only a token of debt. Ask the people in Argentina about paper money, or read what the Founding Fathers had to say about free printing and creation of money, backed by nothing. Every time the Fed "pumps money" into the economy, we are all getting robbed. All of us "little" guys, that is. Somehow people have this misty notion that inflation is the sign of a growing economy. Not so. Inflation means that the money supply is increasing even faster than the economy is growing. This is historically how governments have always paid for things like wars: by creating money out of nothing, out of debt. The money supply DOUBLED during either WW I or II, I can't remember which at the moment. This is a hidden form of taxation that is more potent than any other and more insidious. Soon, foreign investors and countries are going to stop taking our fake money for real goods ($40B per month) and the dollar will start to fall, and when that happens so many holders of US $ will be rushing to get something real that we will have unbelievable inflation and nothing the Fed can do will stop it. It's comming folks. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but certainly within 20 years we are going to have a melt down and hard hard times. Reality can't be cheated. You can't solve anything by adding numbers to electronic bank accounts. You have to actually MAKE something. You have to actually DO something useful.
OK. OK. I'm cutting myself off /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rant.gif
Sorry.
