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What's wrong with insider trading?

Doug Casey on Insider Trading

Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

Recently: Doug Casey on Ron Paul

 
  

L: So, Doug, several people have asked us to talk about the scandal that deposed the head of the IMF; what’s your take on it?

Doug: To all appearances, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but I’ve got insider trading on my mind – let’s talk about DSK next week.

L: Ah. Raj Rajaratnam’s troubles got you riled up?

Doug: It’s a disgrace. Rajaratnam is – or was – a productive member of society who, even if he did break the law, may very well have done nothing morally wrong –

L: Good grief, Doug, you want the SEC to invite us over for tea and a chat? I know better than to expect you to ever beat around the bush, but …

Doug: The SEC is concerned with the enforcement of a set of stupid, counterproductive, expensive, completely unnecessary, and destructive laws. It does so by having its bureaucracy create a myriad of even more stupid, counterproductive, expensive, completely unnecessary, and destructive regulations.

L: But you’d say that about all government law.

Doug: I would, actually, although I know that confuses some people because there is an overlap between government law and what might be called natural law. But this one is topical at the moment, and worth debunking here and now, even though by this time next week people will have totally forgotten that the guy has been locked away for years… along with about 2.2 million others now in American prisons – most of whom absolutely shouldn’t be there.

L: Okay, okay, but for the record – there must be a few snoops who read these things – we abide by all securities and all U.S. law at Casey Research. In fact, the ethics policy I had to sign and that is strictly applied to all of us here at Casey Research exceeds SEC standards, because we not only don’t want to run afoul the law, our reputation is our business and we don’t want to give anyone any reason to doubt our integrity.

This reminds me of your old stunt, asking the Feds in your audiences to stand up and identify themselves, because you knew who they were. Amazing that you got a few to fall for that.

So… where to begin?

Doug: With a definition, as always. The SEC’s definition of insider trading is constantly evolving and growing, though the definition itself – forget about its application – is imprecise and arbitrary. But, more or less, it says that any officer, director, holder of more than 10% of a public company’s stock, or anyone they talk to about material information regarding the company, is an insider.

Like most of the SEC’s rules, the ones on insider trading are arbitrary. They’re similar to the tax laws, in that you often can’t know whether you’re breaking them or not. You’d almost have to live with a specialized attorney to keep from getting in trouble. They can’t be enforced in anything but a sporadic way – basically to cause fear, in the hope that fear will keep the plebes in line. But worse, they are unnecessary and destructive.

L: One thing at a time, then. Unnecessary?

Doug: Yes. There’s nothing wrong with insider trading, per se. For example, there’s nothing wrong with a manager, who knows his company will report a good quarter, buying shares in his company in advance. This causes no one any harm. Let me repeat that: the fact that an insider knows – or thinks he knows – good news is coming and buys shares does not hurt anyone. Actually, it spreads out the buying pressure and may help everyone buy at better prices. Moreover, if someone needs to sell urgently on a given day, maybe for tax reasons, or maybe because their kid needs an operation, then the fact that someone is in there buying with gusto does him a lot of good.

L: But people say it isn’t fair.

Doug: There’s no such thing as fair. “Fair” is necessarily an arbitrary and contentious word, usually employed by busybodies and losers. You think it’s fair to the antelope when the lion eats it? Was it fair to the dinosaurs when Mother Nature wiped them out? Or how about this: is giving everyone an equal share of something fair, if some worked for it harder than others? The guy who knows something and buys has not taken anything from unwilling hands – just uninformed hands – and people have to make decisions with varying amounts of uncertainty all the time. You can’t regulate uncertainty or the uneven spread of information out of existence any more than you can regulate the capacity to intuit the significance of information into every human skull. Not only is it impossible to do, it’s ethically wrong to try. If you’re no good at this game, don’t play it. Life’s not fair. Get over it.

L: I’ve long seen fairness as a false ideal, created by people whom I suspect were simply jealous of those who had more than they did. It’s the have-nots, or want-mores, trying to use power over others to compel them to share what they would not share willingly, instead of working hard to become haves themselves, honestly.

This has caused nothing but harm to all people – especially poor people, actually – because calls for “fairness” often wind up with the ends justifying the means. Assuaging the plight of poverty-stricken people seems like a noble enough reason, perhaps enough to justify a little bit of force, a mild redistribution, especially from those who don’t really need all they have… But this is not justice; it’s brute force with a benevolent mask. And once a governing system has been given such power, it can use it for less noble goals – and in time, it always does. So-called social justice is just the opposite of what it claims to be. Taking from people what they will not give willingly is theft, and by any other name, it smells just as bad.

Justice is hard enough to achieve, though it can be done, with effort. Fairness is just jealousy dolled up.

Sorry… That one really gets me. Back to insider trading. Buying on good news is one thing – what about on the sell side? What if someone knows a company is going to be sued, or have a patent rejected, or some such negative insider info?

Doug: What of it? So, they get out before others do. Some kid gets to the water fountain before the rest – it happens. And, again, it can spread out the selling, actually blunting the impact of the bad news.

Look, there’s no problem with insiders buying or selling based on their knowledge. Even if news is kept airtight until it’s press-released, some people will get it before others. Only the people paying close attention at that time will be able to act immediately. Is that “fair” to everyone else? If the exchanges slapped trading halts on every share every time a company reported news, everyone would be trying to buy or sell the moment the halts were lifted, greatly magnifying the swings, both up and down. This would tend to cause more harm to all shareholders. The whole idea is simply silly.

The fact is that there are many buyers and sellers, each with different levels of knowledge, ability, and need, and the more important differences – in understanding and insight, for example – are internal and individual. There’s no way to truly level the playing field. It’s an impossible ideal, and therefore a destructive goal.

L: What if an insider knows there’s bad news and is telling people otherwise, urging them to buy, like the proverbial used car salesman who fills a knocking transmission with sawdust to quiet the sound?

Doug: Well, that’s fraud then. It’s got nothing to do with being an insider, it’s got to do with lying. A crook is a crook, and he doesn’t stop being a crook just because there are rules – rules just change the way he cheats people. There are ways to deal with this – even laws, if you want to use them. I’m not defending deceit, fraud, or theft. All I’m saying is that it’s impossible for everyone to hear of financially relevant news at the same time, and that it would be counterproductive if it could be made to happen.

Further, if shareholders really want to try equalizing trading opportunities by demanding certain policies regarding trading and the handling of material information, they could do that. This could all be dealt with by contract between the company and its employees. Or by allowing exchanges to regulate this in different ways, appealing to investors who care about different things.

Instead, we get the SEC, which should really be called the Swindlers Encouragement Commission, telling people it’s making sure everything’s fair, thus luring the lambs to the slaughter. The investment world is full of sharks, and it always will be – all the SEC does is lower the average guy’s defenses, which really does encourage swindlers. Just look at Bernie Madoff, a perfect example. The SEC has never prevented a fraud, to my knowledge. Rather, by making everyone think they’re protected, it makes a fraud much easier to perpetrate. Lambs to the slaughter.

L: Don’t hold back, Doug…

Doug: [Chuckles] It gets worse: adding insult to injury, the SEC costs business billions of dollars annually – probably scores of billions, if you take all the secondary and trickle-down costs into account: direct fees, legal fees, printing, mailing, and other costs of compliance. They have a direct budget cost of something over a billion dollars per year, but that’s trivial relative to the indirect costs they impose on the economy. They ought to be ashamed, diverting a significant fraction of GDP from productive use into the pockets of parasites, in the name of protecting business and investors, when they do the opposite. The SEC is like a Pied Piper who attracts ravening hordes of rats with his flute instead of getting rid of them – and then charges people tenfold for the “service.”

This is one agency I would abolish, immediately and completely. Not a single one of its functions should even be handed off to other agencies. The SEC serves absolutely no useful purpose whatsoever – just the opposite. It’s not a question of getting it under control, or paring it back. It should be eliminated in toto.

L: On some level, I think everyone in the market knows this is true. They go along with the insider trading charade because Big Brother is watching, but they know they’ve read things others have not, they know people others do not, they have relevant experience others do not. To hear the bawdy tales around the trendy pubs in financial districts, everyone thinks they know something others don’t. Nobody is trying to be fair – they are trying to win. Short sellers are perhaps the brassiest of the lot; their very positions proclaim that they think they know something others do not. Their counterparties to the short sells know this, and willingly enter into contract with them, pitting their own knowledge and understanding against that of the shorts.

It’s all about skating around the edges without crossing the lines… and for some, it’s all about crossing the lines without getting caught. I think this really is a case of the emperor’s new clothes, at least among investors. But if everyone knows this, why does the myth persist?

Doug: The public and the fat cats – and absolutely the politicians – all think that a high stock market is, almost by definition, a good thing. But a high stock market doesn’t necessarily mean an economy is doing well, or that public companies are doing well – it just means there’s a perception that this is the case. Or worse, in some cases – like now, I suspect – it means nothing at all, other than that people are afraid to hold currency, government bonds, real estate, or other assets and so-called assets. An artificially high stock market can send dangerous, false signals to businessmen and investors. It can cause false confidence – the kind Wile E. Coyote still has when he runs off a cliff. But the government seems to love a high stock market…

Of course short sellers love to see an overpriced market too. And speaking of short sellers, I’d go further and say that they provide a very valuable positive service to other market participants.

L: How so?

Doug: To start with, they’re always on the lookout for frauds. They’re really the policemen of the market, taking down inflated stock prices of bad companies, and alerting other investors of the danger.

Plus, when they short a stock, no matter how the trade goes, they have to actually buy it back at some point, to be able to deliver on the contract. If they are right about a company being grossly overvalued, their selling provides a warning by driving down the price. Further, they are there to provide a bid after they’ve been proven right. By then, almost no one else is buying, and the shorts offer some liquidity, a bid, to the fools and amateurs who didn’t do their homework. And if they are wrong, being forced to cover their short position can push the stock higher, to the benefit of the incorrectly judged company.

L: So, it’s the Wild West?

Doug: First, the Wild West wasn’t nearly as wild as Hollywood has made it out to be. It had an unregulated economy that worked quite well most of the time – better than ours does now, I’d say, given the huge wealth it created for so many people who had the grit to go out there and take nature on. But that’s a conversation for another day. Second, “security” is a fiction – it doesn’t exist once you leave your mother’s womb.

What I’m saying now, to use your metaphor, is that at least out in the Wild West, people knew that they had to be on their guard and take extra care. In the so-called Civilized East, that was just as true – but the need was masked by the veneer of civilization, and people were conned in droves.

And that’s still true today; every investor who enters the market needs to understand that on the other side of every single trade he makes, is another human being. As in all walks of life, not all human beings are equally honest, or smart, or friendly. Remembering this would encourage investors to do more homework.

L: So, back to Raj Rajaratnam. He didn’t do anything wrong?

Doug: I don’t know – I don’t have all the facts of the case at my disposal. If he did something unethical, shame on him. From what I know, it would appear the possible real wrongdoers were the executives of the companies who relayed information to him – if their deal with the company required them to keep it confidential. Of course, if that was the case, then Raj may have been guilty of receiving stolen goods. But that is not what he’s been convicted of. He’s only been convicted of breaking SEC rules.

But I do know one thing: Raj was a very smart and productive guy – that’s how he became a billionaire. Now, instead of creating value and wealth in society, he’s going to be locked up in a cage for years, and transformed into a burden on society.

In any event, if he committed a tort, it should be the subject of a civil suit. It’s not something that should automatically be the subject of a criminal prosecution. If a crime is involved, let an action be brought by the party who was stolen from – not by a government agency, acting on its own.

L: Well, if people want to help him, Rajaratnam’s brother is leading a letter-writing campaign. But the SEC isn’t going away any time soon, so this is all academic. Are there any real-world investment implications you want to point out?

Doug: Sure. Remember that government regulation is just another distortion in the marketplace, like taxes, trade barriers, inflation, and so forth. All such distortions have consequences, and one of them is to create opportunities for speculators. I haven’t done it, I confess, but I think someone who studied the SEC’s predatory behavior could make a substantial fortune predicting outcomes. It’s full of young hotshot attorneys looking to make their bones by attacking guys like Raj. Then they can join a law firm, and charge $1000 an hour to defend clients against the next crop of hotshot young SEC attorneys, who will do the same thing. It’s a very corrupt system.

L: You’ve said things like that several times. It occurs to me to ask what speculators would do in a true free-market economy, where there are no such distortions?

Doug: We’d all have to find another line of work. In a free-market economy there would be very few speculators, because there would be very few distortions in the way the world works.

L: I think I’d become a venture capitalist. It’s the next best thing – plenty of volatility and speculative upside… but it is riskier, because you’re betting on specific innovations, not trends that have to play out sooner or later.

Doug: Perhaps I’d invest in nanotech research, to hasten the day when they can rejuvenate my body and I can play polo properly again. But for now, I really want to urge people who agree with us about the SEC to think long and hard about the issues. They should be crystal clear in their minds, so they can raise their voices in opposition when others around them mindlessly parrot the party line on insider trading. Hope may be scant of changing the system, but that’s no reason to hesitate to debunk erroneous conventional wisdom. It should be debunked because it’s the right thing to do, and because falsehoods and lies are everyone’s enemy. The current corrupt system will go the way of the dodo eventually, on its own. But the more people there are reminding everyone that one just can’t escape the “caveat emptor” dictum, the sooner and the easier the transition will be.

But most of all – the most practical advice I can give investors now – is not to be taken in themselves by the SEC con. There are more sharks than ever in the water, and nothing the SEC does reduces that number. Always, always keep your guard up, and do your homework. Start with researching the people in any given play. That’s what we do at Casey Research: People is the first of our eight Ps of resource speculation.

L: Great – words to the wise. Thanks, Doug.

Doug: My pleasure, as always. Until next week.

L: Next week.


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      May 27, 2011

      Doug Casey (send him mailis a best-selling author and chairman of Casey Research, LLC., publishers of Casey’s International Speculator.

      Copyright © 2001 Casey and Associates

      The Best of Doug Casey

    Debunking Anti-Gold Propaganda.

    Debunking Anti-Gold Propaganda

    by Doug Casey
    Casey Research

    Recently by Doug Casey: Keeping Capital in a Depression

     

     

     

    A meme is now circulating that gold is in a bubble and that it's time for the wise investor to sell. To me, that’s a ridiculous notion. Certainly a premature one.

    It pays to remain as objective as you can be when analyzing any investment. People have a tendency to fall in love with an asset class, usually because it’s treated them so well. We saw that happen, most recently, with Internet stocks in the late ’90s and houses up to 2007. Investment bubbles are driven primarily by emotion, although there's always some rationale for the emotion to latch on to. Perversely, when it comes to investing, reason is recruited mainly to provide cover for passion and preconception.

    In the same way, people tend to hate certain investments unreasonably, usually at the bottom of a bear market, after they've lost a lot of money and thinking about the asset means reliving the pain and loss. Love-and-hate cycles occur for all investment classes.

    But there’s only one investment I can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions – especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. Let’s spend a moment looking at how gold’s fundamentals fit in with the psychology of the current market.

    What Gold Is – and Why It’s Hated

    Let me first disclose that I’ve always been favorably inclined toward gold, simply because I think money is a good thing. Not everyone feels that way, however. Some, with a Platonic view, think that money and commercial activity in general are degrading and beneath the “better” sort of people – although they’re a little hazy about how mankind rose above the level of living hand-to-mouth, grubbing for roots and berries. Some think it’s “the root of all evil,” a view that reflects a certain attitude toward the material world in general. Some (who have actually read St. Paul) think it’s just the love of money that’s the root of all evil. Some others see the utility of money but think it should be controlled somehow – as if only the proper authorities knew how to manage the dangerous substance.

    From an economic viewpoint, however, money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value. Efforts to turn it into a political football invariably are a sign of a hidden agenda or perhaps a psychological aberration. But, that said, money does have a moral as well as an economic significance. And it’s important to get that out in the open and have it understood. My view is that money is a high moral good. It represents all the good things you hope to have, do and provide in the future. In a manner of speaking, it’s distilled life. That’s why it’s important to have a sound money, one that isn’t subject to political manipulation.

    Over the centuries many things have been used as money, prominently including cows, salt and seashells. Aristotle thought about this in the 4th century BCE and arrived at the five characteristics of a good money:

    • It should be durable (which is why, say, wheat isn’t a good money – it rots).
    • It should be divisible (which is why artwork isn’t a good money – you can’t cut up the Mona Lisa for change).
    • It should be convenient (which is why lead isn’t a good money – it just takes too much to be of value).
    • It should be consistent (which is one reason why land can’t be money – each piece is different).
    • And it should have value in itself (which is why paper money leads to trouble).

    Of the 92 naturally occurring elements, gold (secondarily silver) has proved the best money. It’s not magic or superstition, any more than it is for iron to be best for building bridges and aluminum for building airplanes.

    Of course we do use paper as money today, but only because it recently served as a receipt for actual money. Paper money (currency) historically has a half-life that depends on a number of factors. But it rarely lasts longer than the government that issues it. Gold is the best money because it doesn’t need to be “faith-based” or rely on a government.

    There’s much more that can be said on this topic, and it’s important to grasp the essentials in order to understand the controversy about whether or not gold is in a bubble. But this isn’t the place for an extended explanation.

    Keep these things in mind, though, as you listen to the current blather from talking heads about where gold is going. Most of them are just journalists, reporters that are parroting what they heard someone else say. And the “someone else” is usually a political apologist who works for a government. Or a hack economist who works for a bank, the IMF or a similar institution with an interest in the status quo of the last few generations. You should treat almost everything you hear about finance or economics in the popular media as no more than entertainment.

    So let’s take some recent statements, assertions and opinions that have been promulgated in the media and analyze them. Many impress me as completely uninformed, even stupid. But since they’re floating around in the infosphere, I suppose they need to be addressed.

    Misinformation and Disinformation

    Gold is expensive.

    This objection is worth considering – for any asset. In fact, it’s critical. We can determine the price of almost anything fairly easily today, but figuring out its value is as hard as it’s ever been. From the founding of the U.S. until 1933, the dollar was defined as 1/20th of an ounce of gold. From 1933 it was redefined as 1/35th of an ounce. After the 1971 dollar devaluation, the official price of the metal was raised to $42.22 – but that official number is meaningless, since nobody buys or sells the metal at that price. More importantly, people have gotten into the habit of giving the price of gold in dollars, rather than the value of the dollar in gold. But that’s another subject.

    Here’s the crux of the argument. Before the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, a $20 bill was just a receipt for the deposit of one ounce of gold with the Treasury. The U.S. official money supply equated more or less with the amount of gold. Now, however, dollars are being created by the trillion, and nobody really knows how many more of them are going to be shazammed into existence.

    It is hard to determine the value of anything when the inch marks on your yardstick keep drifting closer and closer together.

    The smart money is long gone from gold.

    This is an interesting assertion that I find based on nothing at all. Who really is the smart money? How do you really know that? And how do you know exactly what they own (except for, usually, many months after the fact) or what they plan on buying or selling? The fact is that very few billionaires (John Paulson perhaps best known of them) have declared a major position in the metal. Gold and gold stocks, as the following chart shows, are only a tiny proportion of the financial world’s assets, either absolutely or relative to where they've been in the past:

    Image002

    Gold is risky.

    Risk is largely a function of price. And, as a general rule, the higher the price the higher the risk, simply because the supply is likely to go up and the demand to go down – leading to a lower price. So, yes, gold is riskier now, at $1,400, than it was at $700 or at $200. But even when it was at $35, there was a well-known financial commentator named Eliot Janeway (I always thought he was a fool and a blowhard) who was crowing that if the U.S. government didn’t support it at $35, it would fall to $8.

    In any event, risk is relative. Stocks are very risky today. Bonds are ultra risky. Real estate is in an ongoing bear market. And the dollar is on its way to reaching its intrinsic value.

    Yes, gold is risky at $1,400. But it is actually less risky than most alternatives.

    Gold pays no interest.

    This is kind of true. But only in the sense that a $100 bill pays no interest. You can get interest from anything that functions as money if it is lent out. Interest is the time premium of money. You will not get interest from either your $100 or from your gold unless you lend them to someone. But both the dollars and the gold will earn interest if you lend them out. The problem is that once you make a loan (even to a bank, in the form of a savings account), you may not even get your principal back, much less the interest.

    Gold pays no dividends.

    Of course it doesn’t. It also doesn't yield chocolate syrup. It’s a ridiculous objection, because only corporations pay dividends. It’s like expecting your Toyota in the driveway to pay a dividend, when only the corporation in Japan can do so. But if you want dividends related to gold, you can buy a successful gold mining stock.

    Gold costs you insurance and storage.

    This is arguably true. But it’s really a sophistic misdirection to which many people uncritically nod in agreement. You may very well want to insure and professionally store your gold. Just as you might your jewelry, your artwork and most valuable things you own. It’s even true of the share certificates for stocks you may own. It’s true of the assets in your mutual fund (where you pay for custody, plus a management fee).

    You can avoid the cost of insurance and storage by burying gold in a safe place – something that’s not a practical option with most other valuable assets. But maybe you really don’t want to store and insure your gold, because the government may prove a greater threat than any common thief. And if you pay storage and insurance, they’ll definitely know how much you have and where it is.

    Gold has no real use.

    This assertion stems from a lack of knowledge of basic chemistry as well as economics. Yes, of course people have always liked gold for jewelry, and that’s a genuine use. It’s also good for dentistry and micro-circuitry. Owners of paper money, however, have found the stuff to be absolutely worthless hundreds of times in many score of countries.

    In point of fact, gold is useful because it is the most malleable, the most ductile and the most corrosion resistant of all metals. That means it’s finding new uses literally every day. It’s also the second most conductive of heat and electricity, and the second most reflective (after silver). Gold is a hi-tech metal for these reasons. It can do things no other substance can and is part of the reason your computer works so well.

    But all these reasons are strictly secondary, because gold’s main use has always been (and I’ll wager will be again) as money. Money is its highest and best use, and it’s an extremely important one.

    The U.S. can, or will, sell its gold to pay its debt, depressing the market.

    I find this assertion completely unrealistic. The U.S. government reports that it owns 265 million ounces of gold. Let’s say that’s worth about $400 billion right now. I’m afraid that’s chicken feed in today’s world. It’s only a quarter of this year’s federal deficit alone. It’s only half of one year’s trade deficit. It represents only about 5% of the dollars outside the U.S. The U.S. government may be the largest holder of gold in the world, but it owns less than 5% of the approximately 6 billion ounces above ground.

    From the ‘60s until about 2000, most Western governments were selling gold from their treasuries, working on the belief it was a “barbarous relic.” Since then, governments in the advancing world – China, India, Russia and many other ex-socialist states – have been buying massive quantities.

    Why? Because their main monetary asset is U.S. dollars, and they have come to realize those dollars are the unbacked liability of a bankrupt government. They’re becoming hot potatoes, Old Maid cards. But the dollars can be replaced with what? Sovereign wealth funds are using them to buy resources and industries, but those things aren’t money. And in the hands of bureaucrats, they’re guaranteed to be mismanaged. I expect a great deal of gold buying from governments around the world over the next few years. And it will be at much higher dollar prices.

    High gold prices will bring on huge new production, which will depress its price.

    This assertion shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the gold market. Gold production is now about 82.6 million ounces per year and has been trending slightly down for the last decade. That’s partly because at high prices miners tend to mine lower-grade ore. And partly because the world has been extensively explored, and most large, high-grade, easily exploited resources have already been put into production.

    But new production is trivial relative to the 6 billion ounces now above ground, which only increases by about 1.3% annually. Gold isn’t consumed like wheat or even copper; its supply keeps slowly rising, like wealth in general. What really controls gold’s price is the desire of people to hold it, or hold other things – new production is a trivial influence.

    That’s not to say things can’t change. The asteroids have lots of heavy metals, including gold; space exploration will make them available. Gigantic amounts of gold are dissolved in seawater and will perhaps someday be economically recoverable with biotech. It’s now possible to transmute metals, fulfilling the alchemists dream; perhaps someday this will be economic for gold. And nanotech may soon allow ultra-low-grade deposits of gold (and every other element) to be recovered profitably. But these things need not concern us as practical matters in the course of this bull market.

    You should have only a small amount of gold, for insurance.

    This argument is made by those who think gold is only going to be useful if civilization breaks down, when it could be an asset of last resort. In the meantime, they say, do something productive with your money…

    This is poor speculative theory. The intelligent investor allocates his funds where it’s likely they’ll provide the best return, consistent with the risk, liquidity and volatility profile he wants to maintain. There are times when you should be greatly overweight in a single asset class – sometimes stocks, sometimes bonds, sometimes real estate, sometimes what-have-you. For the last 12 years, it’s been wise to be overweight in gold. You always want some gold, simply because it’s cash in the most basic form. But ten years from now, I suspect that will be a minimum. Right now it’s a maximum. The idea of keeping a constant, but insignificant, percentage in gold impresses me as poorly thought out.

    Interest rates are at zero; gold will fall as they rise.

    In principle, as interest rates rise, people tend to prefer holding currency deposits. So they tend to sell other assets, including gold, to own interest-earning cash. But there are other factors at work. What if the nominal interest rate is 20%, but the rate of currency depreciation is 40%? Then the real interest rate is minus 20%. This is more or less what happened in the late ‘70s, when both nominal rates and gold went up together. Right now governments all over the world are suppressing rates even while they’re greatly increasing the amount of money outstanding; this will eventually (read: soon) result in both much higher rates and a much higher general price level. At some point high real rates will be a factor in ending the gold bull market, but that time is many months or years in the future.

    Gold sentiment is at an all-time high.

    Although gold prices are at an all-time high in nominal terms, they are still nowhere near their highs in real terms, of about $2,500 (depending on how much credibility you give the government’s CPI numbers), reached in 1980. Gold sentiment is still quite subdued among the public; most of them barely know it even exists.

    Some journalists like to point out that since there are a few (five, perhaps) gold dispensing machines in the world, including one in the U.S., that there’s a gold mania afoot. That’s ridiculous, although it shows a slowly awakening interest among people with assets.

    Journalists also point to the numerous ads on late-night TV offering to buy old gold jewelry (generally at around a 50% discount from its metal value) as a sign of a gold bubble. But this is even more ridiculous, since the ads are inducing the unsophisticated, cash-strapped booboisie to sell the metal, not buy it.

    You’ll know sentiment is at a high when major brokerage firms are hyping newly minted gold products, and Slime Magazine (if it still exists) has a cover showing a golden bull tearing apart the New York Stock Exchange. We’re a long way from that point.

    Mining stocks are risky.

    This is absolutely true. In general, mining is a horrible business. It requires gigantic fixed capital expense to build the mine, but only after numerous, expensive and unpredictable permitting issues are handled. Then the operation is immovable and subject to every political risk imaginable, not infrequently including nationalization. Add in continual and formidable technical issues of every description, compounded by unpredictable fluctuations in the price of the end product. Mining is a horrible business, and you’ll never find Graham-Dodd investors buying mining stocks.

    All these problems (and many more that aren’t germane to this brief article), however, make them excellent speculative vehicles from time to time.

    Mineral exploration stocks are very, very risky.

    This is very, very true. There are thousands of little public companies, and some are just a couple steps up from a prospector wandering around with a mule. Others are fairly sophisticated, hi-tech operations. Exploration companies are often classed with mining companies, but they are actually very different animals. They aren’t so much running a business as engaging in a very expensive and long-odds treasure hunt.

    That’s the bad news. The good news is that they are not only risky but extraordinarily volatile. The most you can lose is 100%, but the market cyclically goes up 10 to 1, with some stocks moving 1,000 to 1. That kind of volatility can be your best friend. Speculating in these issues, however, requires both expertise and a good sense of market timing. But they’re likely to be at the epicenter of the gold bubble when it arrives – even though few actually have any gold, except in their names.

    Warren Buffett is a huge gold bear.

    This is true, but irrelevant – entirely apart from suffering from the logical fallacy called “argument from authority.” But, nonetheless, when the world’s most successful investor speaks, it’s worth listening. Here's what Buffett recently said about gold in an interview with Ben Stein, another goldphobe: "You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all – not some, all – of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?"

    I’ve long considered Buffett an idiot savant – a genius at buying stocks but at nothing else. His statement is quite accurate, but completely meaningless. The same could be said of the U.S. dollar money supply – or even of the world inventory of steel and copper. These things represent potential but are not businesses or productive assets in themselves. Buffett is certainly not stupid, but he’s a shameless and intellectually dishonest sophist. And although a great investor, he’s neither an economist or someone who believes in free markets.

    Gold is a religious statement.

    Actually, since most religions have an otherworldly orientation, they’re at least subtly (and often stridently) anti-gold. But it is true that some promoters of gold seem to have an Elmer Gantry-like style. That, however, can be said of True Believers in anything, whether or not the belief itself has merit. In point of fact, I think it’s more true to say goldphobes suffer from a kind of religious hysteria, fervently believing in collectivism in general and the state in particular, with no regard to counter-arguments. Someone who understands why gold is money and why it is currently a good speculative vehicle is hardly making a religious statement. More likely he’s taking a scientific approach to economics and thinking for himself.

    So Where Are We?

    So these are some of the more egregious arguments against gold that are being brought forward today. Most of them are propounded by knaves, fools or the uninformed.

    My own view should be clear from the responses I’ve given above. But let me clarify it a bit further. Historically – actually just up until the decades after World War I, when world governments started issuing paper currency with no relation to gold – the metal was cash, and it was used as money everywhere, on a daily basis. I believe that will again be the case in the fairly near future.

    The question is: At what price will that occur, relative to other things? It’s not just a question of picking a dollar price, because the relative value of many things – houses, food, commodities, labor – have been distorted by a very long period of currency inflation, increased taxation and very burdensome regulation that started at the beginning of the last depression. Especially with the fantastic leaps in technology now being made and breathtaking advances that will soon occur, it’s hard to be sure exactly how values will realign after the Greater Depression ends. And we can’t know the exact manner in which it will end. Especially when you factor in the rise of China and India.

    A guess? I’ll say the equivalent of about $5,000 an ounce of today’s dollars. And I feel pretty good about that number, considering where we are in the current gold bull market. Classic bull markets have three stages. We’ve long since left the “Stealth” stage – when few people even remembered gold existed, and those who did mocked the idea of owning it. We’re about to leave the “Wall of Worry” stage, when people notice it and the bulls and bears battle back and forth. I’ll conjecture that within the next year we’ll enter the “Mania” stage – when everybody, including governments, is buying gold, out of greed and fear. But also out of prudence.

    The policies of Bernanke and Obama – but also of almost every other central bank and government in the world – are not just wrong. These people are, perversely, doing just the opposite of what should be done to cure the problems that have built up over decades. One consequence of their actions will be to ignite numerous other bubbles in various markets and countries. I expect the biggest bubble will be in gold, and the wildest one in mining and exploration stocks.

    When will I sell out of gold and gold stocks? Of course, they don’t ring a bell at either the top or the bottom of the market. But I expect to be a seller when there really is a bubble, a mania, in all things gold-related. There’s a good chance that will coincide to some degree with a real bottom in conventional stocks. I don’t know what level that might be on the DJIA, but I’d think its average dividend yield might then be in the 6 to 8% area.

    The bottom line is that gold and its friends are no longer cheap, but they have a long way – in both time and price – to run. Until they're done, I suggest you be right and sit tight.


    If you take the time to learn more about gold and silver, you’ll realize quickly that both still have a long way to go in this bull market. And with China – and other countries – ready to dump the flailing U.S. dollar, it’s imperative to protect yourself with precious metals. Learn more about China’s secret plot here.

    April 23, 2011

    Doug Casey (send him mail) is a best-selling author and chairman of Casey Research, LLC., publishers of Casey’s International Speculator.

    Copyright © 2001 Casey and Associates

    Keeping Capital in a Depression.

    Keeping Capital in a Depression

    by Doug Casey

    Recently by Doug Casey: Save, Invest, Speculate, Trade, or Gamble?

     

     

     

    Nothing is cheap in today’s investment world. Because of the trillions of currency units that governments all over the world have created – and are continuing to create – financial assets are grossly overpriced. Stocks, bonds, property, commodities and cash are no bargains. Meanwhile, real wages are slipping rapidly among those who are working, and a large portion of the population is unemployed or underemployed.

    The next chapter in this sad drama will include a rapid rise in consumer prices. At the beginning of this year, we saw the grains – wheat, corn, soybeans and oats – go up an average of 36% within one month. In the same time frame, hogs were up 30.7%. Copper was up 29.1%. Oil was up 14%. Cotton was up 118%. Raw commodities are the first things to move in an inflationary boom, largely because they’re essential to everything. Retail prices are generally the last to move, partly because the labor market will remain soft and keep that component down, and partly because retailers cut their margins to retain customers and market share.

    We are in a financial no-man’s land. What you should do about it presents some tough alternatives. “Saving” is compromised because of depreciating currency and artificially low interest rates. “Investing” is problematical because of a deteriorating economy, unpredictable and increasing regulation, rising interest rates and wildly fluctuating prices. “Speculation” is the best answer. But it may not suit everyone as a methodology.

    There are, however, several other alternatives to dealing with the question “What should I do with my money now?” – active business, entrepreneurialism, innovation, “hoarding” and agriculture. There’s obviously some degree of overlap with these things, but they are essentially different in nature.

    Active Business

    Few large fortunes have been made by investing. Most are made by creating, building and running a business. But the same things that make investing hard today are going to make active business even harder. Sure, there will be plenty of people out there to hire – but in today’s litigious and regulated environment, an employee is a large potential liability as much as a current asset.

    Business itself is seen as a convenient milk cow by bankrupt governments – and it’s much easier to tap small business than taxpayers at large. Big business (which I’ll arbitrarily define as companies with at least several thousand employees) actually encourages regulation and taxes, because their main competition is from small business – you – and they’re much more able to absorb the cost of new regulation and can hire lobbyists to influence its direction. Only a business that’s “too big to fail” can count on government help.

    It’s clearly a double-edged sword, but running an active business is increasingly problematical. Unless it’s a special situation, I’d be inclined to sell a business, take the money, and run. It’s Atlas Shrugged time.

    Entrepreneurialism

    An entrepreneur is “one who takes between,” to go back to the French roots of the word. Buy here for a dollar, sell there for two dollars – a good business if you can do it with a million widgets, hopefully all at once and on credit. An entrepreneur ideally needs few employees and little fixed overhead. Just as a speculator capitalizes on distortions in the financial markets, an entrepreneur does so in the business world. The more distortions there are in the market, the more bankruptcies and distress sales, the more variation in prosperity and attitudes between countries, the more opportunities there are for the entrepreneur. The years to come are going to be tough on investors and businessmen, but full of opportunity for speculators and entrepreneurs. Keep your passports current, your powder dry, and your eyes open. I suggest you reform your thinking along those lines.

    Innovation

    The two mainsprings of human progress are saving (producing more than you consume and setting aside the difference) and new technology (improved ways of doing things). Innovation takes a certain kind of mind and a certain skill set. Not everyone can be an Edison, a Watt, a Wright or a Ford. But with more scientists and engineers alive today than have lived in all previous history put together, you can plan on lots more in the way of innovation. What you want to do is put yourself in front of innovation; even if you aren’t the innovator, you can be a facilitator – something like Steve Ballmer is to Bill Gates. It will give you an excuse to hang out with the younger generation and play amateur venture capitalist.

    This argues for two things. One, reading very broadly (but especially in science), so that you can more easily make the correct decision as to which innovations will be profitable. Two, building enough capital to liberate your time to try something new and perhaps put money into start-ups. This thinking partly lay in back of our starting our Casey’s Extraordinary Technology service.

    Hoarding

    In the days when gold and silver were money, “saving” was actually identical with “hoarding.” The only difference was the connotation of the words. Today you can’t even hoard nickel and copper coins anymore because (unbeknownst to Boobus americanus) there’s very little of those metals left in either nickels or pennies – both of which will soon disappear from circulation anyway.

    We’ve previously dismissed the foolish and anachronistic idea of saving with dollars in a bank – so what can you save with, other than metals? The answer is “useful things,” mainly household commodities. I’m not sure exactly how bad the Greater Depression will be or how long it will last, but it makes all the sense in the world to stockpile usable things, in lieu of monetary savings.

    The things I’m talking about could be generally described as “consumer perishables.” Instead of putting $10,000 extra in the bank, go out and buy things like motor oil, ammunition, light bulbs, toilet paper, cigarettes, liquor, soap, sugar and dried beans. There are many advantages to this.

    Taxes – As these things go up in price and you consume them, you won’t have any resulting taxes, as you would for a successful investment. And you’ll beat the VAT, which we’ll surely see.

    Volume Savings – When you buy a whole bunch at once, especially when Walmart or Costco has them on sale, you’ll greatly reduce your cost.

    Convenience – You’ll have them all now and won’t have to waste time getting them later. Especially if they’re no longer readily available.

    There are hundreds of items to put on the list and much more to be said about the whole approach. The idea is basically that of my old friend John Pugsley, which he explained fully in his book The Alpha Strategy. Take this point very seriously. It’s something absolutely everybody can and should do.

    Agriculture

    During the last generation, mothers wanted their kids to grow up and be investment bankers. That thought will be totally banished soon, and for a long time. I suspect farmers and ranchers will become the next paradigm of success, after being viewed as backward hayseeds for generations.

    Agriculture isn’t an easy business, and it has plenty of risks. But there’s always going to be a demand for its products, and I suspect the margins are going to stay high for a long time to come. Why? There’s still plenty of potential farmland around the world that’s wild or fallow, but politics is likely to keep it that way. Population won’t be growing that much (and will be falling in the developed world), but people will be wealthier and want to eat better. So you want the kind of food that people with some money eat.

    I’m not crazy about commodity-type foods, like wheat, soy and corn; these are high-volume, industrial-style foods, subject to political interference. And they’re not important as foods for wealthy people, which is the profitable part of the market. Besides, grains are where everybody’s attention is directed.

    But there are other reasons I’m not wild about owning any amber waves of grain. Anything you want to plant will practically require the use of a genetically modified (GM) seed from Monsanto. I’m not sure I really care if it’s GM; all foods have been genetically modified over the millennia just by virtue of cultivation. And $1 paid to Monsanto typically not only yields the farmer $5 of extra return, but produces lots of extra food – which helps everybody. But I wouldn’t be surprised if someday the giant monocultures of plants, all with totally identical purchased seeds, don’t result in some kind of catastrophic crop failure. This is a subject for another time, but it’s a thought to keep in mind.

    In any event, agricultural land is no longer cheap. But I don’t suggest you look at thousands of acres to plant grain. Niche markets with niche products are the way to fly.

    I suggest up-market specialty products – exotic fruits and vegetables, fish, dairy and beef. The problem is that in “advanced” countries – prominently including the U.S. – national, state and local governments make the small commercial producers’ lives absolutely miserable. Maybe you can grow stuff, but it’s extremely costly in terms of paperwork and legal fees to sell, especially if the product is animal based – meat, milk, cheese and such. Niche foods are, however, potentially a very good business. Eternal optimist that I am, I see one of the many benefits of the impending bankruptcy of most governments as again making it feasible to grow and sell food locally.

    Above all, though, this isn’t the time for business as usual. You’ll notice that “Working in a conventional job” didn’t occur on the list above. And I pity the poor fools working for some corporation, hoping things get better.


    Get more valuable advice on how to survive in a crisis in The Casey Report – a monthly newsletter brimming with top-notch analysis of U.S. and world events, economic research, trend forecasts and investment advice for the big-picture investor. Details in this free report.

    April 14, 2011

    Doug Casey (send him mail) is a best-selling author and chairman of Casey Research, LLC., publishers of Casey’s International Speculator.

    Copyright © 2001 Casey and Associates

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