investing help

OK, show me the cold, hard statistics. I have shown you when a Dow index fund has stunk and given you several examples of individual stocks, including blue chips, that have tanked. I want to see statistics of "stocks" in the generic sense that is always bandied about that have outperformed precious metals.

In the meantime, here's something to mull on-- the performance of the BEST mutual funds over the past 5 years. While most have done well over the past year (as have gold and silver), the 5-year performance of nearly every one of them leaves a lot to be desired.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestfunds/2008/indexfunds.html

 

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http://www.stocks-for-beginners.com/gold-market-price.html

Please keep in mind that the charts use the nominal DJIA return which excludes dividend income. If dividends were included, the result would be much more favorable to stocks.

 

I think the reason we keep going in circles is evident by those charts. When gold is up stocks are down and vise-versa. But on average, stocks are up more than down while gold is down more than up. But some people tend to just see the peaks and nothing more.

I agree with Cloud and have the investments to prove it. But at this point it's like a broken record on conference call with a brick wall.
Guy

 

Cold war was mostly over with by 1975. However, if you want to compare military expenditures during this period vs the last 5 years in the USA I will be glad to discuss it. Produce the numbers since you brought it up.

It seems you really are not in a position to defend what you claimed as I supppose if you were, you would have provided more than this. People talk big until they are pinned down to produce some real information. As I said, I don't care to change your opinion, that is your issue. However I recommend that if you are indeed an investor, and you are using the early 1980s as some sort of guide to investing, then you very well should learn what drove prices then. Assumptions have burned a lot of people.

 

Well I cannot attest to all of it but I will say the idea of the cold war being over in 1975 was simply not true....just one example of expenditure during the cold war....I only bring this part up because I was part of the 600 ship navy at the time.

 

[h=2]Reagan plan[/h] It was against this backdrop in 1980 that the United States began an election year. Ronald Reagan, a Republican, ran the presidential race on a platform that included improving the armed services, which appealed to then-current American fears regarding Soviet military power.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] He continued this in 1984, releasing a campaign commercial, A bear in the woods, which played on the use of the bear as a national symbol of Russia, asked the rhetorical question, "Isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?"
Under the programs put forth by Reagan,[SUP][citation needed][/SUP] the overseas strategic retaliation arm was strengthened and the development of new weaponry like the B-1B bomber, the Bradley fighting vehicle, and the Abrams tank was completed and they were put into production.
[h=2][edit] Ships and weapons systems deployed during the plan era[/h] The Navy saw the largest benefit of the rebuilding. Under the Reagan Administration, the first of the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines was completed. This class was the largest submarine ever built in the U.S. The ship carried 24 Trident I nuclear missiles, each one capable of hitting targets 4,000 miles distant. Construction of the Nimitz class of supercarriers and Los Angeles-class attack submarines was dramatically stepped up. The revolutionary new Aegis combat system was installed on the up-and-coming Ticonderoga-class ships, production of which was also stepped up. Several aircraft carriers were put through Service Life Extension Programs (SLEPs) aimed at keeping them in service longer. The Iowa-class battleships, built in the 1940s, were all recommissioned and refitted with RGM-84 Harpoon, BGM-109 Tomahawk, and Phalanx CIWS system capabilities, plus their armor plating would be more resilient against anti-ship missiles. The first Harpoons, Tomahawks, and AGM-88 HARM missiles all debuted on the navy's ships. Naval aviation was stepped up with the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet, along with improved versions of the EA-6 Prowler electronic countermeasure aircraft, the A-6 Intruder, and the F-14 Tomcat. In addition, the nation's strategic retaliatory arm was stengthened with advanced B-1B bombers and deploying Pershing II theater missiles to Europe. The initiative also included deployment of sophisticated Abrams main battle tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles.
While many of the increases would not reach their full deployment, by 1990 the United States Navy was by far the largest in the world, with 15 carrier battle groups, four battleship surface action groups, and over 100 attack submarines.
[h=2][edit] End of the plan[/h] Eventually political pressure to reduce the national budget deficit resulted in Congress reversing itself and passing a series of declining defense budgets beginning in 1986. Weinberger clashed with Congress over the cuts, resigning in late 1987, and was succeeded by the more pragmatic Frank Carlucci.[SUP][2][/SUP] Lehman's successor as Navy Secretary, James H. Webb, remained a fierce proponent of the expanded fleet, and disagreed with Carlucci over how to cut the Navy budget in line with other services. Webb resigned rather than endorse Carlucci's cut of 16 frigates.[SUP][3][/SUP] As revealed in The Reagan Diaries, Reagan reflected about Webb's resignation on February 22, 1988: "Present Sec. Webb resigned over budget cuts. I don't think Navy was sorry to see him go."
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the lack of a perceived threat against the United States, several of the Reagan Administration's policies and plans, such as the "600-ship Navy", were scaled back or abandoned. U.S. bases across Europe and North America were slowly decommissioned and closed, others were mothballed. In the Navy, this resulted in the retirement of several older carriers, the decommissioning of all four of the Iowa-class battleships and the cancellation of the remaining Seawolf-class submarines.
By 2009, there were only 285 ships in the U.S. Navy.[SUP][4][/SUP] However, the United States still possesses the most powerful navy in the world.

 

In 1975 our military was at it's lowest point since before WW2, the drain of Vietnam in both material and men left a hollow shell of a military. The cold war was hardly over by the 1975...politically it was quiet...no Cuban crisis or anything but it was hardly over. When Regan took office and during his presidency (please go view the video he produced called "a bear in the wood" American military expenditures went thru the roof.

The 600 ship navy (of which I was a part of from 1982-1989) and all the military saw the replacement of roughly 75% of the aged equipment that the military used during the Vietnam war. This time (1980-1988) you added a dozen new aircraft carriers...a new fleet of cruisers, destroyers, frigates and submarine force. This is when the Abrams tank, B-1 Bomber, F-18's, F-117A (stealths) and about 80% of the equipment we fight with even today was born.

Figures in Billions

1974: 299
1975: 293
1976: 283
1977: 286
1978: 286
1979: 279

1980: 303
1981: 317
1982: 339
1983: 366
1984: 381
1985: 405
1986: 426
1987: 427
1988: 426

2006:535
2007:527
2008:494
2009:494
2010: Not yet released
2011: Not yet released

* None of these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

Now this is not counting covert ops/aid packages and all the other crap that get's hidden from us...these number are appropriated for the 4 services and a portion of the Coast Guard and National Guard units. For my part I figure we probably spend an extra Trillion or 2 over the last decade in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq doubtful we will ever know. All that being said to say the cold war was over in 1975 is not correct, as I can testify that at the time our only concern during the 1980's was how to counter the Russian threat, at least that is what I spent 8 years doing.

 

It's not that I think gold has to go astronomical. Gold could go to 1000 and if the DOW did the same it would still fulfill the trendline. If we start seeing gold in the multiples of thousands I think we'll see a severe deflation more likely than a hyperinflation, since such a scenario would indicate widespread loss of confidence. I think both are a better place to be than currencies, but in the event we do see such a deflation I would rather be in precious metals.

I'm also not saying that this has to happen. Anything can happen. I just put a higher probability on gold outpacing stocks, and both of those outpacing currencies, but you could very well be right about stocks as well as your interpretation of the chart. It's just not my perception.

 

Time will tell.

 

Do you just make this stuff up? If you don't know something, just admit it.

 

No I'm not making it up. In 1975 the Soviets and Americans flew a joint space mission called Apollo-Soyuz. This took a huge amount of cooperation between both countries given the logistics of sending two different spacecraft to be joined together in orbit. Contrast this to the "cold war" of 1963 where we almost had a nuclear war over cuba in part because there was no way for even the leaders of the two countries to talk to each other.

It was winding down big time by the late 1970s. Anyone who claims differently should come up with some facts to the contrary rather than producing useless one-liners as you just did.

 

Your contemporary numbers are completely wrong as you left out all the war spending which was not budgeted but which did become part of the debt. (Which I stated in my post) Reagan isn't relevant to this because he didn't take office until January 1981. Go back and read the post again in context. We are talking about the economy leading up to the gold bubble of 1980 and why it isn't relevant now.

Your numbers do prove my point however. During the period from 1975 to 1980, military spending was at its lowest. Hardly something that is done if you are in a "war" with anyone. Totally different than now where we are fighting 3 "wars" which have no endpoint defined.

 

The war in Viet Nam was just ending in 1975, with the USSR backing NV. The invasion of Afghanistan didn't even begin until 1979, which was a major cold war confrontation. The Star Wars arms buildup in the 80s was a highly significant Cold War confrontation. A good case could be made that the cold war never ended with Russia upgrading their nuclear forces, resuming nuclear air patrols, building underground cities in the 90s to make it thinkable to win a nuclear exchange, and signing joint military agreements with China aimed at the West. And this doesn't even include the proxy wars fought by surrogates like Cuba around the Carribean and in Africa. I even read, but cannot now source, that it was learned after the fall of the USSR that in the late 70s some USSR military elite recommended war against the West at the time our military was depleted because they thought it was their best chance of victory. Even now the US is ringing Russia and China with military bases, aimed at what?

So let's not speak of this nonsense of the Cold War ending in 1975. If you had said that by 75 the threat of a nuclear exchange had diminished, maybe. But the Cold War was one fought on many levels and in many places other than the tip of ICBMs.

 

Curious to know if you were even alive in 1975 or all of this knowledge is coming out of a book. We could not of fought a war in 1975-80 if it was dropped on our doorstep....that 5 years the military was as weak as it was in the 5 years leading up to WW2. The massive spending in the 80's was a result of trying to make our military look like one that belonged to a superpower (which it did not).

As far as my numbers I did mention in my post an estimated 1-2 trillion dollars on the current wars over the last decade, those numbers were OMB congressional numbers for the armed services, please read the full post before commenting on the numbers.

On the cold war premise I honestly don't think you were around in 1975 or you would know better than to make those statements. We were in no condition economically, militarily or any other way to be aggressive in the cold war, we bashfully sat in the corner as there was no way the public was going to back an escalation at that time, but that does not mean it was gone or was ceasing to exist.

[video=youtube;IHO4M_Tar7A]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHO4M_Tar7A[/video]

 

soviet and US military and economic issues



US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006



Delta 183 launch vehicle lifts off, carrying the Strategic Defense Initiative sensor experiment "Delta Star".


Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors.[SUP][208][/SUP] Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system,[SUP][209][/SUP] which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.
Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges.[SUP][210][/SUP] The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military–industrial base.[SUP][211][/SUP] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas[SUP][which?][/SUP] where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.[SUP][212][/SUP]

After ten year old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.


By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, president Carter began massively building up the United States military. This buildup was accelerated by the Reagan administration, which increased the military spending from 5.3 percent of GNP in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 1986,[SUP][213][/SUP] the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history.[SUP][214][/SUP]

Tensions continued intensifying in the early 1980s when Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program that was canceled by the Carter administration, produced LGM-118 Peacekeepers,[SUP][215][/SUP] installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight.[SUP][216][/SUP]
With the background of a buildup in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the deployment of Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany.[SUP][217][/SUP] This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.[SUP][218][/SUP]
After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military[SUP][219][/SUP] because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy.[SUP][220][/SUP] At the same time, Reagan persuaded Saudi Arabia to increase oil production,[SUP][221][/SUP] even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production.[SUP][222][/SUP] These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues.[SUP][208][/SUP][SUP][220][/SUP] Issues with command economics,[SUP][223][/SUP] oil prices decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.[SUP][220][/SUP]

On September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, when it violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island —an act which Reagan characterized as a "massacre". This act increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.[SUP][224][/SUP] The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, has been called most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership keeping a close watch on it considered a nuclear attack to be imminent.[SUP][225][/SUP]
US domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.[SUP][226][/SUP] The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counter-insurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.[SUP][226][/SUP] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.[SUP][98][/SUP] While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the United States, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy.[SUP][227][/SUP]

Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US and other countries, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion.[SUP][228][/SUP] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam".[SUP][228][/SUP] However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system.

A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay".[SUP][229][/SUP][SUP][230][/SUP] The Soviets were not helped by their aged and sclerotic leadership either: Brezhnev, virtually incapacitated in his last years, was succeeded by Andropov and Chernenko, neither of whom lasted long. After Chernenko's death, Reagan was asked why he had not negotiated with Soviet leaders. Reagan quipped, "They keep dying on me".[SUP][231][/SUP]


Not that it means a damn thing 30 years later but the airliner bit I bolded there.....I was there helping to look for bodies and debris so please stop with the cold war ended in 1975 bit. So while your assumption of gold price movement may very well be correct, your absoluteness regarding the period of time of conversation is a bit clouded to say the least.


Apologies in advance to the mods for turning this thread into a history lesson

 

You may have hit the truth. Nobody alive back then could have missed so much of what was going on. But that may be what they are teaching as "history" in middle school these days.

 

I will never forget how as a teenager the media/government would point towards the soviets and say.."that is the enemy". When I joined the military there was no other concern other than harass, maneuver and try to provoke a response from the Russians; **** i even remember in grade school practicing emergency procedures in the case of nuclear attack.

I may have missed the missile crisis, but I remember all of this and the fact that the 1970's just plain sucked....terrorism, oil embargo's, super inflation, odd/even days at the gas pump. Today is no picnic by any means but a lot of the thing we see today is just history repeating itself and chances are it will again sometime in the future.

 

The cold war was given as a response to a question about economics of 1975-1980. It's a matter of opinion whether it was winding down or not but it's irrelevant to what was being discussed. What is relevant is Military spending during that period. Since you very kindly provided the numbers anyone can see that at that time military spending ever was at its lowest since gold was legal to own again. It proves my point.

What Reagan did in the later 1980s had nothing to do with the 1980 gold bubble.

 

Ah so these quotes were just speaking about economics not in general

Sorry did not realize you were speaking on just the economic aspects like the Apollo-Soyuz and Cuban Missile crisis, well done and nice backtracking on what you were discussing by bringing those points about the cold war being over.

 

Oh drop the false victimization. Those posts were made to your responses in this topic where you jumped in and had no idea what was being discussed given your distractions about Ronald Reagan and something about you being a sailor. Who cares.

This what was being discussed.

If you think what you posted has anything to do with this then I apoligize. If not, then I recommend reading a topic in context before you jump in with a bunch of irrlevant posts in regards to what someone has said.