The past decade has been a nearly unqualified success for gold investors. The metal went for roughly $250 an ounce in 2001 …
gold
The Redboxification of the American Shopping Experience
What will the vending machines of the future look like? What’ll they sell? Perhaps the question should be: What won’t they sell? Coinstar, the company that owns DVD kiosk giant Redbox, is testing out new machines that’ll sell …
Why Gold Is Down (But Probably Not Out)
The recent collapse of gold prices is stirring a lot of conspiracy theories. Are the bars in Ft. Knox just painted bricks?
15 Financial Moves to Make Right Now
Most of the best financial advice is timeless. It remains sound in good times and in bad. But this particular moment of economic and market turmoil has some unique characteristics, so Moneyland put together a handful of smart …
Diamonds May Be Forever, But Are They Investments?
Affluent investors are looking for an inflation-fighting commodity other than gold, and in finished diamonds, they may have found one.
The Right — and Wrong — Ways to Buy Gold
I realized that I didn’t have the whole gold thing worked out when I found myself riding the New York City subway system with $12,000 worth of gold coins in my shoulder bag. The load was not only heavy; it was making me …
Bernanke and the Inflation Fear Bubble
Here’s another data point that gold and other things that are supposed to trade up when inflation spikes are in a bubble: The prices of books about hyperinflation are themselves hyperinflated (from Fortune):
Jens O. Parsson’s out of print economic treatise, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations, is selling
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Is Gold about to Bust?
The consumer price index, which measures inflation, was out this morning and it was down slightly in April. Here’s what Calculated Risk had to say:
The disinflationary trend continues – and with all the slack in the system (especially the 9.9% unemployment rate), it is hard to see inflation picking up any time soon. The high unemployment
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Visiting Ron Paul’s Fed-free utopia
After being urging to do so by several readers, I finally read Ron Paul’s End the Fed. I was about to buy it for the Kindle I got for Christmas, but when I got to work Monday morning there was a package in my mailbox from Gary Howard at Paul’s Campaign for Liberty with two copies of the book. I gave one to my colleague Stephen Gandel, …
New column: All that glitters (it’s about gold, get it?)
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with the crying baby on the cover.
While we’re on the topic of the cover, I should mention that Andy Serwer’s cover story on The Decade From Hell is not purely an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror. Well, actually, it is mostly an exercise in looking through the rearview …
The semi-return of the gold standard
There are the gold bugs, with their tales of impending economic apocalypse. And then there are people like Martin Murenbeeld, chief economist for Canada-based money manager DundeeWealth. “I’m just an economist who happens to like gold,” he says. “I’m not always bullish on it.”
Right now Murenbeeld is bullish on gold. He was here at TIME …
Q&A with David Krueger, Author of “The Secret Language of Money”
People have weird relationships with money. The value we give to currency and wealth goes beyond its mere value to buy and sell goods. Money has meaning. It can make people feel good or bad, envious or inferior, lucky or distraught. People can get emotional about money—and bad decisions are often the result. The concept of money is so …