That is exactly why when I decided to buy some metal I just looked at metal. When you get into "collectable" there is just too damn much volatility. With the stuff I buy its just metal. Price is whatever the melt price is that day. Not what some collector might pay. Seemed much easier to me.
Or, you could explain it easily enough to folks unfamiliar & they could understand.
The banks were downgraded because their mortgage businesses have imploded. You have to make mortgages to package them and sell them . You cant make mortgages if no one is buying houses and the mortgage market has be slammed with 7%+ rates
Yep once again all is playing out just like before. As those who made the last mess pretend nothing is wrong until another crash. Then the same people will run to every camera they can find to tell everyone they are here to fix this.
Well, we'll see how long it takes to turn this time. I think it will be longer than seems reasonable.Yep once again all is playing out just like before. As those who made the last mess pretend nothing is wrong until another crash. Then the same people will run to every camera they can find to tell everyone they are here to fix this.
Because it turned out that there was much more oil around than people thought at the time. New reserves were discovered and technology advances allowed utilization of previously known but unrecoverable sources (shale deposits, etc.). The dire predictions heard over and over about, "We'll run out of oil by (date such and such)" proved false. Adjusted for inflation, the price of gas has only increased about 10% since 1974, when the nationwide 55 mph speed limit was imposed. Under President Trump, the inflation adjusted price of gas was actually 22% lower than in 1974. A gallon of gas is still cheaper than a gallon of Coca Cola. Which is the greater value?
It's still a finite resource.
Yeah, but it's the current price of fuel which influences people's choice of vehicles.
Eh not really. I mean it is but as the price increases the feasibility of different means of extraction goes up. Wer'e fracking like crazy in this country and are producing more oil than we ever have been despite what right leaning media might be telling you. Thats just the US. Oil rich areas are still pumping oil the old fashioned way and when that runs out they'll start fracking and oil shale and synthetics will get financially more do-able too. As demand goes down with improved ICE efficiency and greater electrification of cars you'll see the end of oil as we know it getting pushed farther and farther back. Yeah , eventually it will become so expensive to burn it will get shifted more towards petrochemical use . What are we looking at ? 300-500 years maybe? I think we'll have viable alternatives to 90% of oil needs withing a few hundred if that.
As I recall, OPEC had cut way back on oil production to raise the price of oil. It skyrocketed. There were gas shortages all over America. Many people had to wait an hour or more in gas lines only to be able to partially fill their tanks, as most gas stations put quotas on what they would sell to individual customers before they ran out and closed. About the same time Nixon suddenly ended the exchangability of dollars and gold, which Americans had been forbidden to do for years. He actually had no choice. We were going to run out of gold if we continued letting everyone else exchange dollars for gold. So suddenly in response to these things we had inflation of dollars in double digits. There were also food shortages.
It sure as hell does. The price of gas and economy in general tend to play into this BIG time. Wife and I had both wanted a Wrangler for a LONG time. We kept going back and forth as I was refusing to pay half what a new one ran for one that was 10 or 15 years old. Every time she would find one in the 10Kish price range they were 10 or 15 years old and a LOT of miles on them. I kept saying if I was going to pay that much I would just buy a new one and soon we would buy nothing. When the price of gas went from $1.50 to almost $6 here all of a sudden there was a glut of used ones at dealers. When we went shopping again many lots had as many as 10 of them to look at. Many of them with only 20 or 30 K on the clock. So did not take long to pick out one that was a 1 owner, with under 40K and about 1/2 what new was running and we pulled the trigger. It suddenly was a buyers market for these which was great for us.
The 73 Arab oil embargo was response to the Yom Kippur war. It wasn't to raise prices although that was the effect. Nixon ditching the Gold Standard happened in 1971 although it had largely ended in the US in 1933.
In that case, I shouldn't worry about it.
A few years or so back there was a sudden "rush" on it and price almost doubled for a while. Can't remember what it was set that off. If something does set off another it will be fun to watch. Especially for those of us who have a good amount of it. If there ever is another big run on it would be real tempting to dump what I have back in
