They’d actually also be very likely to get you targeted by thieves as well. Even if you tried to keep quiet about them, there would be an entire chain of custody which would be required inform when such a large quantity of gold bullion where sold or bought, as well as their transportation and the transportation’s insurance, if you don’t get scammed in the process.
This is always my question. Like you see these movies about gold and diamond heists, but then… Wtf do you do with them? Who are you selling this shit to at retail value, or anywhere close to it?
I feel like if somone handed me a bag of diamonds right now I’d have no idea wtf to do with them.
You’d have no idea what to do with them because you’re not in organized crime. I would go look at Larry Lawton on YouTube. I think he posts a lot but if you go to his earlier posts he talks about his organized crime life. Wild.
I’m reminded of so many fiction subplots where a character has acquired an extremely valuable XXX they want to sell.
More often than not, it’s such an important object that any interested parties would sooner hire mercenaries to get it, and kill its owner as a witness (and in many of those stories, exactly that happens). Past a certain value, many items are not actually valuable for common people.
The bar in the picture says it’s a kilo which is $65, 344. While I could agree with OP that 10 kilos would give you an average house in higher priced areas like new York or LA, it would definitely buy you several nice houses in 1920.
I’m seeing $412K as the average price of a home in 2023, not $495K. And gold was $2,135 in 2023. The price in gold is still higher in 2023, though about 193 bars for a home.
Couple other notes, more related to the post.
1920 is an oddly good year to use. It’s just after WWI. Industrialization and modernization are taking off across the US. Worker’s rights are beginning to take hold and working class people are now able to afford homes. It’s before the Roaring 20s, so you’re not going to get the actual details obscured with the market rush and subsequent depression.
There is a couple important downsides though…
Firstly, mortgages didn’t really exist back then. I mean, they did, but they were horrific. You’d have to go to an insurance company because banks wouldn’t offer them. The terms would give the insurance company full ownership of the property. If you were lucky, it would be a balloon loan - pay only the interest during the 5-10 year term and then pay the entire balance at the end. If you were less lucky, it was a lifelong contract where you only paid the interest plus fees every month.
There was an alternative but most people didn’t have access to it: membership in a Savings and Loan corporation, also known as Building and Loan or thrifts. You’d join as a member and agree to buy X shares every month. If you give a notice (30-90 days usually), you would be allowed to cash out the shares plus interest earned for their actual value. When you wanted to buy a home, you would be allowed to use your shares as collateral. Each monthly payment would pay for the interest and a certain number of shares. Once you had enough shares, you would redeem them to pay off the loan. A bit complicated, but S&Ls were fantastic for the common person. They were owned by the members of your community and all loans went to support said community.
Secondly, kind of related to the first point, there were no 30 year mortgages. Home prices are virtually tied to the monthly payment and a thirty year mortgage allows for lower monthly payments. Prices might get out of line a bit, such as right now, if people believe that interest rates will drop and they can refinance later. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see any drops for at least two years and, even then, we won’t see anything like the 2020-2021 rates unless we experience an economic catastrophe like 2008. You want higher rates when the macro environment is strong and lower rates when it’s weak. Cheap debt in a good economy is basically a handout to the rich - makes you wonder why Trump pushed the Fed to keep them low back in 2018-2019…
I am really quite torn on this one… In my language the definition of sexuality boils down to something (both intuitively felt and expressed) that changes over time with ones self awareness, current needs, state of being, moods and feelings…
So… this just feels like a pleonasm from my perspective. Which wouldn’t be a problem at all but it kinda undermines the value of the word sexuality in itself — as something well defined or constant when clearly by definition is not at all…
I am guessing that this word is created and meaningful for people, groups or nations where sexuality as a word is being very poorly treated or even in some ways censored / taboo?
I’m in Canada. 25 years ago my parents bought a home for $130k, they sold it 15 years ago for $500k, it’s now listed for $1.1 million. We are so fucked.
Housing can’t be an investment (i.e. exponential growth above inflation) AND an affordable place for people to live for future generations. This mentality is absolutely brain-dead.
Still a tough bind for someone who isn’t already a homeowner. I’ve put a lot into index funds which have performed really well, but if I sell them now to buy a house and the real estate market shits the bed (which it really should), then I’m in an even worse place. I remember talking to people in 2007 who complained they would “never be able to afford a house”, but three years later their local listings fell by 30-40%.
Look, unless you’re renting it out, your house isn’t an investment. It grows in value and that’s nice, but you’ll spend more on maintenance and improvements than it will increase in value.
For sure, it just illustrates that as much as the market can feel fucked up, as an investment housing isn’t necessarily the best. I’ve checked the numbers many times when I hear people talking about their parent buying a house for X$ in 19XX and it’s very rare that they beat the market. It’s the people that bought in 2009/2010 or right before COVID that are the real winners when it comes to real estate as an investment because they made a lot of money for the amount of time, but people who buy as an investment to hold it long term? Nah
If you had of invested the equivalent amount of money in the Dow Jones index instead of purchasing 10kg of gold and kept it invested from 1920-2024 you would have ~$15 million.
So I get the idea of a hedge, but I guess the question on my mind whenever I hear talk about hyper-inflation is “what are you going to do with the gold if society collapses?”. My thought is that if the world economy got so fucked up that the US dollar was worthless, and the government didn’t step in, then wouldn’t we sorta be in a failed state? And if we were in a failed state is the plan to sit on the gold in some sort of fortress to wait for civilization to come back? Hoping that you can defend it and that the incoming civilization doesn’t just take it?
I’ve always assumed you’d melt the gold down and create coins or other tradable sub-amounts of the gold that you could exchange for goods and services. If people are still peopling, they’ll still want a currency to transact with; if the dollar has failed then gold has a historical precedent that would probably make it easier to convince people to trade with you using it as a medium of exchange. It always seems like it’s more suited to be an emergency measure than a plan A to me.
At the same time, it picks and chooses its dates. Gold has been volatile, with the price oscillating between $2,100 USD in 1980, $470 USD in 2001, and back up to $2,200 USD in 2011.
The meme may be true, but it is less meaningful than you might assume at first glance. The obvious comparison is those memes comparing wages or dollar values with house prices, where obviously inflation has made a huge difference in 100 years. However, you should compare it to other types of investment, so does a stock index grow as fast as home prices or not?
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