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I agree it was an easy call, in hindsight. When the price of houses are 5 to 10 times incomes in many areas, something is going to crash - but when? In my case I shorted Countrywide and several other financials. It was NERVE-RACKING being about the only person in the country that actually read some of their loan documents (from a Florida county website) rather than simply taking the word of Orangeman.

I managed to ride Countrywide all the way down, and rode the others maybe 25% down, before getting cold feet and bailing. I kept my stock-picking record perfect...which was that every stock I ever ‘owned’ has gone down - but this time I got a nice car out of it. LOL.

I agree, with the feds printing money like mad, and with these sick attempts to prop up housing prices, it’s really hard to predict what’s next. Unfortunately people involved in gold don’t sit around like zombies, but instead are proactive and have already priced in inflation (i.e., when I started shorting, it was late 2006 - I could not believe that these stocks were still near their highs...WHAT IDIOTS were holding them?).

Now we have a new world, where every country is trying to kill their currency at the same time. The logical thing would be to buy land - but it is being inflated by low interest rates - so I wait for the bottom to fall out of the dollar.

We are supposed to buy what nobody else wants, based on the market signal of price. Houses are still a bit high although in my county 60-70 miles west of DC there are livable (i.e. rentable) houses for reasonable prices. BobL points out that gold has inflation priced into it. The Fed will have to allow high inflation sooner or later to alleviate the debt burden (other alternative is to default, or I suppose we could grow our way out of it). But our public and private debt is also deflationary as it hangs over the economy. Here's what I would buy: a bunch of dredges for gold mining to sell to urbanites who decide to become gold prospectors. Buy scads of shovels to sell to the folks who can't afford a dredge.

Seriosuly though, I like BobL's land idea but other people are still snapping it up. Even better to buy land with something on it like timber or water. I "buy" collectable gold and silver by trading in junk and bulk precious metals. The prices are high, driven by the PM prices, but often a low multiple. I've got a stash of copper wire although I might end up using some of it myself. Buy a decent classic car if you like that sort of thing. Go to the flea market and buy things that look good; I buy unique colored glass pieces (vases, bowls, etc) but only if they look unique and colorful. I don't pretend that it's worth anything, but at buck or five bucks does that really matter?