" The age of cheap food is over "

[AzariLoveIran]

[Simple Minded]

Azari,

After the gold bubble bursts, watch the market value of fat people explode.....

[AzariLoveIran]

[Demon of Undoing]

Last person I knew that got into gold got in @ about $600. A drop would have to be pretty dramatic.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Nonc Hilaire]

[Marcus]

I'm likely dumber'n a post about such things but here goes:

Gold and real estate are wealth, their value is subjective, and such holdings represent a huge body of wealth sitting idle as a store of value. Now I can see why the governments of industrial nations, all playing cards around a big, round table, and using a stack of IOU's for chips, would like to get their hands on that wealth in order to pay off those IOU's [read "unfunded liabilities"], but how would it benefit those governments if the subjective value of those holdings were to collapse and all that accumulated wealth simply disappear?

From that perspective, I don't see the store of value lying in real estate, gold, etc. disappearing, but I can imagine governments trying to get their hands of it.

As for the future, folks like Wendell Berry have been saying for years that ". . what is needed is a reorientation toward a system of agriculture driven by small farmers who grow their crops at the local level, using both sustainable and environmentally compatible methods." To my mind, the earth is capable of supporting far more people than it does today . . the problem is not production but rather distribution. The world simply cannot sustain the cost of distributing non-locally-grown foodstuffs around the world.

[Torchwood]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Sparky]

[Simple Minded]

[Tinker]

[the glowing carp]

If anything that is suggestive of top price being some way off.

[Simple Minded]

[Tinker]

[Simple Minded]

[Marcus]

We just got back, a couple weeks ago, from driving, from the Alaska side, up to Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. Place is a bee hive of gold mining activity . . according to the locals, the hills are as full of miners and prospectors today as they were during the gold rush . . everything from mom-and-pop diggins with gold pans to huge, multi-national operations.

Talked to one old guy who ran a small, placer operation with his wife. While clearing overburden this spring, he unearthed a matched pair of mastodon tusks that he sold for $37,000 bucks.

[Nonc Hilaire]

[Marcus]

[Nonc Hilaire]

[Sparky]