[JTHomes]

I'm no investment big shot, win some/lose some. But buy low sell high works with gold just like it does with a stock, yet it has instrinsic value, where stocks have none (just ask Kmart investors of a few years ago). One of the luckiest decisions I made was to taking about 30% of my money out of stocks in early 1999 (yes I felt like a chump most of that year) and invested about half in physical gold and half in gold funds. Still holding all the physical and some of the funds, and they have way out performed almost anything else I have been "invested" in the last 6 years while the Dow has basically traded between 9000-10800. I may start peeling those positions off and get heavier in stocks soon. I think if you are patient, buying anything that represents value at a historic low will make you money.

[arthurus]

Buy low sell high works with gold in that the dealer has maintained his value. He has not lost money other than a % or two of transaction costs. If he is lucky and hits the tops and the bottoms in speculative mode he increases the value of his investment.When the gold price is moving rapidly there is an element of speculation involved and it tends to be, as in this case, catchup to increased number of dollars. The inflationary addition to the money supply has been fairly even since 1999 but gold has risen in steps. Gold mining stocks can be a good investment in a sharper than "normal" inflation because buyers bid up the stocks faster than inflation when the nominal gold price is increasing faster than other commodities.

The Clinton Fed actually began the inflation for some reason. The existence of that surplus should have precluded inflation as the debt was necessarily decreasing if the surplus was real. There was no necessity to inflate out of the debt. Bush gets the main blame for the inflation, though. He was explicit that that was what he was doing but he called it by its other name-Devaluation.