Last week proved that Gold as a Safe Haven Investment is totally worthless. The stock market crashed and guess what, the safe haven that should be souring in such a case crashed together with it. How far? No one knows, even the dips did not activate buying and that is a very dangerous signal.
I have no idea what we will see next week but little is needed to start panic selling and a total free fall as a result.
Are there really safe havens? Some people say it is stocks that are "recession proof" like Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, McDonalds, DollarTree, Philip Morris and Verizon, AT & T.
The dollar proved that it is still the best safe have currency, the Euro, British Pound and even the Swiss Franc are losing sharply against the dollar.
The dollar index is up to 78.5 from 73 in the last few weeks
How would you protect your nest egg?
Originally Posted by waverunner234
Markets ebb and flow...that includes commodities. And yes, gold is a commodity. Gold's problem is that it has no intrinsic value on it's own...it's worth what everybody says it's worth. I like gold, and silver...it's a commodity with a history of being money...but as money the value has been fixed by government. I have a little bit of gold and a lot of silver....but I see that as my emergency get-out-of-town stash, something to bribe the TSA VIPR team with who are on I-10 blocking my exit to the Hill Country or the Gulf Coast.
But that's the doomsday scenario...no more nest egg, because we just went to hell and a hand basket.
One problem I see with gold....government (particularly this one) has in times past BANNED the ownership of gold. History tends to repeat itself, and you could see FDR's signature move all over again. If things get bad, you think Obama won't start confiscating gold and outlaw it's use as an exchange medium....at a deflated price fixed by the government....if that happens, government can collect hundreds of BILLIONS of gold on the cheap, because the price will shoot up, but Americans will have to supply it at a discounted reimbursement price (if they're reimbursed at all!)
As far as nest egg.... I like what Jim Cramer (I know he's a blowhard, so you can save it) calls accidental high-yielders getting 6-8% returns on ....if you look at that but ALSO look at companies which have been around for a century or more....they're not going away anytime soon. Established companies make stuff, and while the value rises and falls, they will always be worth something, short of 100% nationalization and seizure, but then again, if that happens, we're turning into a Marxist dictatorship (I argue we're 3 executive orders from being there anyway). In that case, retirement and your nest egg won't matter, money won't matter, because you will live and die at the behest and on behalf of the State with whatever they let you have.