Robert Sczech

Is Black Gold Worth More than Real Gold?

If you value oil, you should hold gold. The hidden assumption behind the thesis of Mike Conion is that we will always be able to buy oil with Dollars. That is an assumption which may be proven wrong one day. Gold on the other hand, is always accepted as payment for oil (Alan Greenspan).

The main difference between gold and oil is that oil is a depleting asset, while gold is not being used, gold is being accumulated. While the total amount of oil in the ground is decreasing every day, the above ground accumulated gold is increasing every day (more than 160,000 tons of gold are presently above ground). If no replacement for oil is found, this means that oil will outperform gold during the next 50 years.

If oil starts getting scarce, food will become scarce as well. For that reason, the recommendation is, start accumulating food. Storing large amounts of food on your property is not as dangerous as storing large amounts of oil in your backyard.

Like food, oil can not be stored indefinitely. It will eventually evaporate and change its chemical composition.

Metals Manipulation - Or Simply Deleveraging?

I do not mind market manipulations as long as prices are kept down. I would object against a market manipulation only if the price of gold would go up, that is, supply of gold being withdrawn.

Seriously, who would object if the government forced the price of bread lower?

Where We Should Be Investing: The Paradox of Thrift

"Abundant consumption" can not be the goal of any sustainable economy. Consumption means consumption of resources like oil, metals, fish, soil etc. Many of the problems our economy is suffering from today have their origin in the fact that the US is running out of important natural resources, most spectacularly oil, but also many important metals are becoming scarce.

It took nature hundred of millions of years to create the oil in the ground. Mindless consumption has burned more than half of that oil. If we ignore oil imports, the remaining oil reserves in the US would not suffice to run the US economy for more than 5 years. Depletion of natural resources can not be compensated by more investment. People invest into oil and metals simply because they start to realize that these, although nonrenewable, are being wasted by the "consumption economy".

The Case for Gold Today

Diversifying 3% to 5% of all savings into precious metals (including gold) is a low risk proposition. Mutual funds charge routinely more than 1% in management fees per year, so diversifying 5% into precious metals is the equivalent of giving up 3 years of management fees to financial institutions. Any allocation of less than 10% into precious metals is not significant if the present financial system is going to survive. On the other hand, if the financial system is going to fail, than an allocation of 10% (or less) into precious metals may not be enough in order to preserve the purchasing power of your savings.

U.S. Oil Production Flat Over Past Four Years

The US produces roughly 5 to 6 million barrels of oil per day. It takes at least 6 month for the US to produce 1 billion barrels.

The claim that oil production was constant during the past 4 years is most likely also wrong. Since 1971, the US production declined at the average rate of 2% per year.

Alternative Energy for Investors: High Volatility, Great Promise

To say that renewable energy is expensive in comparison to conventional fossil fuel energy sources, is equivalent to saying that oil is still cheap. What are you going to say when oil gets really expensive, say $500 per barrel or, even worse, oil is not available at any price? Are we going to sit in our houses in the dark and freeze simply because renewable energy was more expensive than fossil energy?

In my opinion, we should invest into renewable energy as long as the energy produced is much higher than the energy needed to produce this alternative energy infrastructure.

Promising Solar Power Technologies

Using concentrating mirrors in order to heat up water sounds impressive (and the first picture displayed surely is a smart publicity stunt). However, all of this does not change the fact that the total amount of energy harvested is limited by the area of the mirror. The power generated by the mirror displayed is perhaps only a few KW on a cloudless day. I doubt that this technology is economically viable.

Similarly, solar panels made from flexible thin film may be significantly cheaper than standard panels. But that advantage could be nullified by a possibly drastically lower life expectancy of the cheaper panels. The cost of a panel should be judged against the total amount of energy collected by the panel during its effective life time. The standard silicium panels come with a warranty of 25 years by their manufacturers. What is the warranty on the flexible sheet panels? 10 years would be insufficient.

Solar Stocks Feeling the Heat

Jack, 33 euro cents at present exchange rates is equivalent to more than 50 US cents (not 21 US cents as you claim!).

Common Misconceptions About the Fed and Gold

There is this old claim that the Fed is a private institution which enslaves the American people via the issue of debt money. This claim although true, misses the main point. The Fed is only a legal construct designed to obfuscate the truth. Monetary policy is set by the US government and money is issued (via the treasury bonds) by the US Treasury. The main purpose of fiat money is to simplify the collection of taxes. In order to keep taxes steady and growing, the US government needs a tool to control the economy. That tool is the Fed and its manipulation of short term interest rates.

In order to truly understand our monetary system, we need to look at it from the point of view of generating a stream of taxes to support congress and the general government. These tax collections have been rising steadily over the years, regardless of how the economy is doing. It is this rising percentage of the GDP which is collected by the governments which is the actual problem - not the fact that the Fed is officially a private institution. Although the Fed is a private institution, no Fed chairman will ever act against the will of congress or the US president.

Net Exports of Major Oil Exporters Likely to Fall

Let's assume for the moment that we are not at peak oil yet and that the high oil prices are due excessive financial speculation in oil futures.

Let's assume further that peak oil will happen one day - that is a very reasonable assumption given that the earth can hold only a finite amount of oil.

Then we should be very grateful to the financial speculators since by artificially pushing prices up, they force us to lower our consumption of oil and in this way, direct our efforts to alternative forms of energy. In this way, when the true peak oil arrives (in 2030 by the most optimistic predictions), then we will be well prepared so that the transition to other forms of energy will be easy and relatively painless.

To sum, it would be foolish to prohibit speculation in energy futures. These speculators are in fact beneficial to our long term interest.

The Gold-Oil Ratio Approaches All-time Lows

Engineer: Storing energy in a car battery means that one can recover a high percentage (80% to 90%) of that energy stored in the battery. Gold is not a store of energy since the energy expended in producing that gold can not be easily recovered. It takes energy to grind a stone into sand. Once the sand is produced, there is no easy way to recover the energy dissipated.

Having said that, I agree with you that gold is a highly desirable metal. The main usage of gold is jewelery (wedding rings). In other words, we need gold in order to attract a woman. We need oil in order to give more than 6 thousand million humans the privilege to participate in the unfolding drama on this beautiful planet located in a tiny spot of the universe. Without oil, the human population would be much smaller.

The Gold-Oil Ratio Approaches All-time Lows

User 163397: gold is fairly priced if not expensive, but oil is still cheap.

The Gold-Oil Ratio Approaches All-time Lows

Industrial civilization can thrive without gold, but it can not survive without oil. Already a stagnating oil production can cause significant problems as we experience now. While gold is being mined for hoarding (all the gold ever mined is still around), oil is being burned within a few weeks after being produced. Worse still, once burned, oil can not be recovered, that is, oil is a nonrenewable resource.

I think the declining gold/oil ratio is just a reflection of a global revaluation process. Energy used to be extremely cheap, in the future all energy will be very expensive. My bet is that the gold/oil ratio will decline further towards a long term equilibrium value somewhere between 1 and 3.

Market Power, Asset Allocation and Oil Price

The production of crude oil in the US is declining since 1970. We produce today roughly 50% of the amount of oil we produced in 1970. That decline of production happened despite lots of drilling and the usage of the most sophisticated pumping technology in the world. It has little to do with politics but a lot with the geology of the oil fields. The remaining US oil to be pumped yet is less than 20% of the oil the US was originally equipped with before the oil bonanze started. In other words, we already used more than 80% of our own oil. What is left, could power our way of life for less than 5 years if imports were not allowed. Energy independence is a delusion.

It is a great tragedy that this simple truth, 30 years after the onset of the production decline, is still unknown to the educated people of this country.

Why Today Is Different From the Inflationary 1970s

There are two meanings to the word "inflation". One meaning is the growth of the money supply, the other meaning is the growth of consumer prices (CPI). Consumer prices have indeed risen very slowly during the past 25 years. This is perfectly illustrated in the cost of a first class stamp which in the fall of 1984 was 24 cents while today it is 42 cents. This price change translates to an average yearly price change of 2.4%. Unfortunately, that low figure is misleading.

The majority of all consumer goods sold today in the US is manufactured abroad, not in the US. The low cost of consumer prices reflects therefore the high productivity of foreign economies, not the productivity of the US economy. Secondly, these foreign made consumer goods have not yet been properly paid for (persistent trade deficits). We pay for these consumer goods not with our own goods and services but with financial assets (like US Treasuries). However, financial assets represent claims on future production of US goods. That is, consumer goods in the US are being paid for with promises of future US production of goods. The deception is in the fact that this future US production will never materialize, at least not at today's low prices (indicated by the looming bankruptcy of Ford and GM). In order to arrive at a correct figure of the consumer price index, one has therefore to take into account the growth of the total amount of US financial assets held by foreign creditors. This sum (many trillions of Dollars) represents the unpaid cost of imported consumer goods.

Looking at the second meaning of the word inflation, namely the growth of the money supply, then we experienced during the past 25 years an almost hyperinflationary growth of the money supply. That growth is visible in stock market charts, in the cost or real estate in New York City and in the level of yearly bonuses paid to people working on Wall Street.

To sum up, the past 25 years were indeed a paradise for consumers and people working on Wall Street. The price for these excesses has not been paid yet. But we can not avoid it in form of either a global depression or hyperinflation depending on how the central banks decide to rebalance the system.

There are no free lunches. This wisdom hold true not only in daily life, but also in macro economics as well as in financial engineering.