By
Craig R. Smith
Chairman
Swiss America Trading Corporation
If the stock market is a great investment, why do Madison Avenue executives get paid tens of billions of dollars each year to promote it? Gold puts real, reliable value in your hands, and gold companies spend comparatively little on advertising.
I looked into both. Since 2000, the DJIA has increased by 159%, from $11,722 to $29,000 - on average, about 12.5% per year.
But is this a giant shell game? The Dow during those years changed, delisting 11 of its 30 benchmark companies and replacing 37% of them since 2000. They just keep replacing the numbers.
Gold, by comparison, since 2000 has increased 575% -- from $280 to $1,900 today - an average of 28% per year"¦.or about 3.6 times more than stocks.
And nothing has been "delisted" from gold. It remains the natural, constant standard of real money that it was in year 2000, and that it was 2000 years ago.
Nations understand this, which is why Russia in June 2018 announced plans to double its gold mining and become the world's second-largest gold producer. What do they know that you don't? [1]
Advertisers try to sell us what sparkles and can be given a temporary shine, from stocks to mysterious digital currencies with no proven track record.
I had one friend who invested his hard-earned money in diamonds, even though I told him that scientists could now make diamonds out of cheap charcoal barbecue briquettes. For more than a century the diamond monopoly company De Beers had propped up the cost of diamonds, but this could not last.
De Beers, in late May 2018, announced that it would sell synthetic diamonds at bargain prices. [2] Was this its last-ditch effort to control the market in diamonds? Diamonds sparkle, but his dream of a retirement nest egg has gone a-glimmering.
Will scientists ever achieve the ancient alchemist dream of turning base metal into gold, as they now turn carbon into diamonds?
In 1980, Nobel-prizewinning physicist Dr. Glenn Seaborg created a few hundred molecules of gold by atomic bombardment of bismuth, as Lowell Ponte and I documented in our free book Money, Morality & The Machine. [3] But Dr. Seaborg told Associated Press that creating one ounce of gold by this method "would cost more than one quadrillion dollars."
All the natural gold ever mined or gathered as nuggets would fit into a cube only 66 feet on a side, or would fit into one Olympic-sized swimming pool. Gold's scarcity, incorruptibility, and beauty explain why gold remains precious while things based on paper and politics, from stocks and bonds to government fiat money, have been valuable for a brief moment and then been "delisted," often suddenly, by history.
With the steady, reliable glow of gold lighting your path, you never need worry that a company or its stock are being mismanaged, or that government or banks are manipulating values. This is why my wife of 43 years, when I mention other investment "opportunities," tells me: "Just buy more gold."
To learn more about why gold should be a part of your portfolio, call Swiss America at 800-289-2646.
Footnotes:
[1] Tyler Durden, "Russia Set to Double Gold Mining, Becoming World's 2nd Biggest Gold Producer," ZeroHedge, June 3, 2018.
[2] Elizabeth Paton and Vanessa Friedman, "'Diamonds Are Forever,' and Made by Machine: De Beers is Getting Into the Lab-Created Diamond Business," New York Times, May 29, 2018.
[3] Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte, Money, Morality & The Machine. Phoenix: P2 Publishing, 2016. Pages 183-184.
