Yeah, but 10%/yr isn’t bad at all, especially when everyone else is down hard over the same 12 years at the moment. Gives you the opportunity to sell the gold to stock market castaways at a high return, then buy their now unwanted stocks at rock-bottom prices and sit on them ’til they rebound, furthering your profits.

Don’t look at me that way, I never bought or sold a mortgage-backed security in my life, honest ;)

One thing that’s certain is the physical lump of gold really didn’t grow at all between when you could buy it at $300 and when you could sell it at $900.

(There’s a lump of platinum in Paris which is used to define the kilo, the whole point of which being that it hasn’t changed since the end of the nineteenth century.)

The change in value of gold reflects sentiment, and the relative ease with which new gold can be extracted from the ground.

In that sense it’s no different to property – a house costing $300K in 2001 which could be sold for $500K in 2006, even though it was the same physical pile of bricks and mortar.

The bubbles are at different stages of the cycle, that’s all.

Also, as others have pointed out the free advice you get on TV (from Kramer et al.) is worth about as much as you pay for it.

The underlying problem, of course, is that people want to make the majority of their money simply by *having* money – and that’s just not a terrific creation of value.

Actually those investments provide the capital corporations need to create. So there is a terrific creation of value simply by investing when it is compared to having that money simply sit under your mattress neither doing anything nor helping others do something. Investors provide an incredibly valuable service to the economy even if they aren’t toiling in a field or factory.

as I read this I was listening to the current DJIA which is above where it was on Jan 20, 2009 and not far from where it was on Jan 1, 2009.

And who should plead the larger mea culpa? The pundits who were driving eyeballs and eardrums to advertisers….or the greedy fools who listened to them and wanted to get rich quick?

It got to the point where it was between suicide and quitting. Thankfully, quitting won.

they were actually successful in their industry’s greater quest, which was to enact the greatest redistribution of wealth to the wealthy since about 1300.

Can’t be said enough times!

The “economic crisis” is well-scheduled final profit taking by the Bush puppeteers. All is going entirely as planned (with the exception of Obama and McCain poisoning the TARP funds boo hoo hoooooooooo).

What Olen fails to note in her article is that Peter Schiff didn’t just endorse Ron Paul in the primary election season, he served on the campaign as Paul’s economic adviser. This is why Ron Paul alone of all the presidential candidates was warning voters two years ago that the financial system was in grave danger of collapse, that the Federal Reserve was incapable of dealing with such an event, and was, in large measure, responsible for it. He warned that the investment bankers’ lobbying money had bought most of the congressional representatives serving on the banking and finance committees, and had drafted the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagal and other laws that allowed the system to fail, and engineered the “transfer of wealth to the wealthy.”

And Paul was, of course, ridiculed mercilessly during the debates for being an alarmist and out of touch with reality.

Spreading the idea that the stock market is bogus and that gold is the real investment is only going to make YOU the idiot pundit in 5 years when gold is back down and stocks back up. How are you different?

I’m playing devil’s advocate here a bit because I do believe that pundits were reckless and wrong, but in the same vein as the housing market, there are two sides to the equation: the sellers and the buyers.

I see things really going to shit over the next five years, before we truely recover.

I am not trying to be a troll here…

First off stocks and investing is not a science. Everyone’s going to have their opinions and these can change in a week, a month, a day. There’s a reason why investment accounts always say they’re not insured or guaranteed.

Not much piece of mind when your entire 401k is in mutual funds, but regardless everything has a risk. I think that’s where the problems lies. No one should ever take what these people say as word. If Jim Cramer say buy Ag stocks but you don’t feel comfortable, don’t buy it. Simple. What works for one person is not what works for the next person.

I get the premise that we feel like we have no other option, and sure the system is broken and it would be nice to know the government has our back, but everyone needs to accept responsibility. If someone told you to jump off a bridge and you did it would you blame them?

If you’re overweight the formula is simple but extremely difficult to follow: Eat less and exercise a lot more. Also, you have to be consistent; none of this diet-on for one month, diet-off for three weeks. That doesn’t work, ever.

If you’re looking to save for retirement the formula is simple, but again, it’s extremely difficult to follow. Consume less and save a lot more. Also, you have to be consistent.

I agree that there are a huge number of variables that affect “consumption” and saving. And, I agree that individual financial situations require individual game-plans; where-as most overweight people can follow the same rubric.

However, the simple truth remains: there are no magical diet books and there are no magical personal finance books. To blame authors who rode the wave of consumer greed for causing everyone to have a bad financial year is ludicrous.

And, when you go to financial self-help websites, don’t read the bullshit on the front page for day-traders. Click over to the retirement saving and–regardless of the source–the story is almost always the same: Start early, create a game-plan, revisit your game-plan annually to compare your goals/needs, and stick to your plan–regardless of how you feel emotionally, or how the world is telling you to feel.

Recognizing the whole system is an arbitrary game that we created stops making it so surprising when you see certain groups losing.

Still, I didn’t like the way this piece started with the whole gold thing as the best example of failed punditry, either. The part of the story that amazes me most is how advanced some of these advisers can get about investing minutia, yet how little that matters if the investments go down as much as they did.

The underlying problem, of course, is that people want to make the majority of their money simply by *having* money – and that’s just not a terrific creation of value.

Indeed. And, in the immortal words of deep-throat: “Follow the money.”