wengem

'Too Far, Too Fast': A Look at Asset Classes

I was kind of hoping that you would draw the conclusions and I would read them.

Why Gold Is Losing Its Shine

If gold goes down 50%, so be it. It will have a lot of company down there with the rest of my portfolio!

Inflation: Demand Destruction and Wealth Erosion Trump Money Growth

I'm late to the party, and no economic genius... but isn't runaway inflation the likely scenario once the point of inflection is hit? What I mean by that is this: the moment inflation starts to win out over deflation, the velocity of money will accelerate rapidly. It's the same argument used for deflation but in reverse. With wealth destruction, lack of lending, increased personal savings and foreign demand for dollars, velocity drops off significantly which is what we've seen. Well then it makes sense that at the first sign of inflation, banks will lend again because they don't want to hold on to dollars when they could make interest; there's less incentive for personal savings; and most importantly foreign demand for dollars drops. So the Fed has to raise interest rates to run the huge deficit. The problem with raising interest rates is that we spend and consume way more than we produce, so we have no way to ever pay the interest except with a printing press! (or I guess we could have a national yard sale)
I don't even think it takes an economic recovery to trigger the switch from deflation to inflation. We saw just the other day that China is not too psyched about so exposed to the dollar.

Is the GLD ETF Really Worth Its Metal?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't GLD trade at a discount to their holdings - expenses? If that's true, some portion of the counterparty risk is mitigated.

Is the GLD ETF Really Worth Its Metal?

Don't forget that there is risk and overhead in owning physical gold too. You have to consider the possibility of theft and counterfeiting. It's much less liquid than GLD. You are also likely to pay a significant premium to the spot price and have a hard time recouping all of that premium when you sell.
Unfortunately all of the variables and unknowns make a good analysis of risk/reward/overhead between GLD and physical gold nearly impossible to do.

The End of Gold, Part Three

Lance & sickofthehype... correct me if I'm wrong, but if inflation went as high as you say, wouldn't interest rates also go through the roof? As a result, only those homeowners with fixed rate mortgages would benefit. Anybody with a variable rate would get slammed... unless the lenders voluntarily let them off the hook by refinancing them into a fixed mortgage at the pre-inflation rate. And if they were willing to do that, then why not just let the underwater homeowners off the hook now?

Gamestop: Friendly Employees, Unfriendly Customer Strategy

To a company that has more than $7 BILLION of revenue annually, one million dollars of unclaimed deposits drawing interest is pretty meaningless to the bottom line.

Activision: Growth Already Built into Stock

Cardboard Zombie, you are way off base on the Starcraft 2/WoW comparison. Starcraft is just a multiplayer real-time strategy game and will use the existing (free) Battle.net to connect players. It is not the next WoW and you can't start charging a subscription fee for this type of game... especially when you've been giving it away for years. Compare to sales of Warcraft 3 or Command & Conquer 3 for a more accurate picture. 5-10 million copies sold and no revenue from subscriptions is more like it.