Civilized people don’t buy gold. That’s what Charlie Munger said in 2012 when most people expected that the world was going to end because of a prediction that was made by the Ancient Mayans. Maybe he said that because he wasn’t expecting that the end of the world was coming during that year.
Or, maybe he meant that intelligent investors only decide to hold assets that they understand and are familiar with. His best friend, on the other hand, Warren Buffet, bought a fifth of the silver production in a single move. That’s why Warren is regarded as the best investor of all time and not Charlie. Visit this link to find out more.
The interesting thing about investors is how much indifferent they claim to be about their investments. When everything looks good, they claim that they have no emotion toward their portfolio. However, when things are going bad, they often sell the assets that they’re most unsure of, even though they made perfect sense on paper.
In the end, humans are emotional beings, and it’s much better to put your money into things that you really believe in. As for precious metals, they’re the oldest known investment to humankind, and they will remain to be a part of plenty of portfolios in the future.
Trust vs. Historical success
Trusting a company with your money is a big deal. You’re essentially betting on them to succeed, and if they go bankrupt, you’re losing all of your money. It’s like going to a roulette table where 80 percent of the outcomes are going to be red, and 20 percent are going to be black.
There’s still a chance for a black swan event when the ball lands on zero, and you get liquidated. Most modern portfolio builders believe that whenever they’re diversifying their assets, they should expect a high return on investment. The trust they have in the companies must be compensated for the risk they’re taking. Let’s look at Apple, for example.
Since they’ve had a great track record in the past decade, most people will agree that the company is only going to get bigger. That’s why it’s quite difficult to explain how precious metals have outperformed it without having a cash flow quadrant. Follow this page for more info https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/movies/gold-review.html.
When you’re buying silver or gold, you’re not getting any compensation for the risk. You just have a piece of metal. There’s no rent, no interest, and no dividend. The shiny object just stays in one place and looks at you in the eye.
Nevertheless, in the period between 2010 and 2020, silver has had an outstanding growth of 19 percent per year, while gold was a bit behind at only 18 percent per year. The growth is not based on price increases but on how much of the metals you would need to buy specific items. For example, if you needed 500 ounces of gold to buy a house in the 90s, now you would only need 100.
The supply of these metals is getting tighter, which means that the price will soon go on an upward trend with no hints of slowing down. In 2008, when the United States experienced the worst period in the past four generations, the only asset that was doing good was gold.
The largest financial institutions filled with the smartest people all went to zero, and precious metals were there to carry the world on their shoulders. From 2008 to 2012, gold rose 140 percent, and silver rose 260 percent.
Why can precious metals outperform all other assets?
It’s all rooted in the concept of money as we know it. People don’t have control over the monetary supply. That’s the role of the Federal Reserve. This means that they can print as much or as little as they want to. Since government spending has been increasing every year, that will eventually lead to the devaluation of the dollar, which we’re all experiencing at the moment.
Everything in the stores has gotten more expensive, and the living standards are getting higher. When governments increase their spending, they use either current or deferred taxation. The only way that the debt can be repaid is through inflation or future taxes on the people. Since the latter would cause riots, the only sensible choice is to silently induce inflation, which is an indirect way of taxing their own people.
All of those doomsday preppers are probably happy at this time since inflations levels have crossed the 2 percent barrier point because now we’re sitting at 7.5 percent. Matters are only going to get worse since the only way out of this problem is deflation, which will slow down the entire economy of the world.
The only protection against these two phenomena is gold sovereign coins and having a stockpile of precious metals. This includes both gold and silver, even though the latter is more volatile in the short term. Now, all eyes are pointed at the political situation in Europe because those kinds of events can spiral out of control quite fast.
If the Eurozone reaches the end of a fiscal cliff, the entire world could go into a bear market where currencies get inflated and deflated at the same time. The only thing that could thrive at that time would be real assets like real estate and precious metals. Paper assets like stocks and bonds will be burned to a crisp. It’s a Catch-22 situation.