The 21st century gold rush

I find it interesting, if not a little comical, that many of the mainstream media are "onto" this gold rush of 2008-2009. They missed calling the dot.com bubble of the 90s, and for sure missed calling the real estate bubble earlier in this decade; but they are "onto" the commodity bubble like white on rice. Waiting for it to burst. To think that investing in something like gold, or silver, or corn, or copper, or natural gas is sound investing........It's just all so pre-modern or something. I do appreciate the balanced reporting by the two dudes at the Yahoo-Finance outfit, at least they appear genuine. Blodgett writes good blogs too.

But the question of the day is how did one ounce of gold end up being worth, at today's count, $1200.00?

There are probably many factors involved in this, but I think that irresponsible money management plays a big part in the answer. How has our country ended up in so much debt?...... Further playing into this is the fact that China, India, Brazil and South Korea all have huge reserves, but their reserves are mainly in U.S. dollars (they are our creditors after all). China is doing everything it can for the government and their people to get precious metals without putting the prices into orbit. They are recommending that all their saving citizens put at least 5% of their savings in gold and silver. They are also buying up gold mines left and right. If there is a gold mine for sale anywhere in the world, China will buy it before the rooster crows. The IMF is selling it's gold "off the market" so not to dramatically disrupt prices. Last month they put some (200 tons) up for sale. Oops China! India got to it first and bought every ounce. Crazy.

So where do we (the good ole U.S.) stand in all this? We have gone through interesting changes in our country for a while. We had a time of industrialization, this is probably known as the good times for many. Sometime in my life time, I don't know when for sure, we morphed into financialization. When I say this I mean that Wall-Street's primary focus went from preserving wealth at interest to the creating of wealth. In the late 90's you could not watch a football game without being inundated with 25 investment commercials. Easy money was the name of the game. This is a difficult drug to get off of once you get addicted.

And now we are going through "politicization." This is probably not a good thing. Government is best when it is localized, but more and more power is heading to D.C. It appears now that Wall-Street and D.C. have entered into some strange sort of marriage. Big banks fail, and the D.C. gang bails them out and keeps the leaders around.

Here's another example of politicization: I read yesterday that $31 million dollars from the stimulus package was alotted to renovating two remote border crossings between Montana and Canada. The average traffic per day at these crossings?..........22 vehicles. This is great work. Fold on-- Big brother!