For Whom Wealth Matters
April 4, 2012 Leave a comment
The table above is from http://7million7years.com/2011/05/26/the-pay-yourself-twice-wealth-strategy/. I put it up here as it is such a nice way of explaining things and keeping expectations of returns from different types of investment vehicles realistic.
April 4, 2012 2 Comments
Mr Buffett’s views on gold (post before}will definitely help us realize just how much money can be made in good times from the possession of various assets like securities and farmlands.But come the hard times there is just nothing else that compares with gold.Ganesh Ratnam explains how gold has been a pretty good investment for Indians.
Mises Daily:Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Ganesh Rathnam
India’s obsession with gold is well known around the world. To most Western commentators, this obsession seems irrational, and Indian people seem like incurable gold bugs.
However, on closer examination, gold ownership in India is neither excessive nor irrational. In fact, when religious, cultural, and historical perspectives are considered, India’s appetite for gold seems rather matter of fact indeed. Nonetheless, it is not lost on any Indian worth his or her salt that gold is the asset that best protects wealth and freedom.
When my father, a pediatric surgeon, wanted to buy land to construct his clinic and supplement his meager government income, he purchased the land by mortgaging my mother’s jewelry. Similarly, millions of people in India have capitalized their businesses or farms, or secured their basic necessities after severe business reversals, by pledging their gold jewelry. As we shall see below, were it not for gold, the average Indian’s lot through history could’ve been a lot worse.
India’s private gold ownership is difficult to determine accurately. However, several websites, such as Gold Eagle, estimate the total private gold holdings to be about 15,000 metric tons. Compared to that figure, the Indian government owns a negligible 360 metric tons of gold. Read more of this post
April 4, 2012 5 Comments
“Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. Read more of this post
March 27, 2012 Leave a comment
The following is the work of Ila Patnaik,a professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, Delhi.It was published in today’s Indian Express.
These days it is fashionable to talk about how gold is draining away India’s precious forex,how gold is the refuge of black money and how opting for gold is somewhat anti-social and unpatriotic.I decided to post this article here to remind people of how gold has long been a good friend of Indians of all classes and especially of Indian women.Gold has been around a lot longer than the subject of economics and economists.Economic fads come and go but gold worked for our grandparents and will not fail us.Keep your gold.Hold it as bullion or high karat jewellery and keep it safe and do not be tempted,pursuaded or coerced to exchanging it for paper of any sort whether currency notes or gold deposit/accumulation schemes,ETFs,certificates or dematerialized units.
Having said my piece I will now leave you to get on with reading the article below
With increased import duties on gold, we return to pre-liberalisation thinking
The inflation crisis of the last six years, coupled with a persistent lack of financial inclusion alongside a decade of high GDP growth, has given an upsurge in demand for gold. The increase in custom duty on gold proposed by the Union budget, and the reduction in the loan-to-value ratio of gold loans by the RBI, will hurt the poor. Read more of this post
February 6, 2012 1 Comment
Collecting coins can be an engrossing and rewarding hobby.
I started collecting coins when I was about 2 years old.My dad worked in the airport then.Every few days he would bring me a few foreign coins and my mom used to tell me about these far away countries.My mom was also trying to prepare me to begin school and her way of teaching me about money and counting was to get me to play with the brass coins of those days.These were the earliest coins to make their way into my collection.
When I started collecting coins I didn’t have any focus nor did I care about the value of the coins might have in future.But years later I was pleasantly surprised to find out just how much my coins were worth.A brass 20 paisa with a lotus picture was a pretty common coin then and even now.Nevertheless it sells for no less than 8 rupees today.A compounded annual gain of close to 10% per year for 48 years. Read more of this post
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