Word: goldings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gold, that barbarous relic, is having a thoroughly modern moment in the spotlight. Its price in dollars ($1,170 per ounce when last I checked) is setting a new record every few days. Cash4Gold and its competitors have been flooding the airwaves with ads exhorting you to fork over your gold jewelry for dollars. And for the first time since 1971, when U.S. President Richard Nixon unilaterally yanked the world off the gold standard, gold is also attracting interest from a crowd that usually doesn't pay it much heed: the world's central bankers...
What's going on? Part of it is the fact that "gold's gyrations are the Dow Jones index of anxiety," as this magazine put it three decades ago amid the last big gold fever. When investors are scared - about inflation, about political turmoil, about financial breakdown - they return to the soft, shiny metal that has for millennia served as a store of value. When things calm down, as they did after the gold price peaked in 1980 at $850, demand for gold subsides and the price declines. (See pictures of modern day gold prospectors...
...there is more to gold's current boom than just a flight to safety. The metal is showing signs of a more sustained run at respectability. So while its price will at some point stop going up (and start going down), don't count on another descent into seeming irrelevance, as occurred in the 1980s and '90s. That's because of changes in the mechanics of investing in gold and the weaknesses of the current gold-free international monetary system...
...used to be that to buy gold you had to actually buy gold. In 2003, I went to Manhattan's 47th Street jewelry district to purchase a few hundred dollars in gold coins. When informed that I had to pay cash, I left and never made it back. Dumb move, I know, but indicative of the less-than-investor-friendly ways of the business. One could buy stock in gold-mining companies, but that added a layer of volatility and risk. Since 2004, however, it's been possible - through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) - to effectively own gold without the hassle...
...werewolves of The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the North American wickets, according to studio estimates. And none of the three debut films in wide release could earn even half of what The Blind Side did. The only movie to spark hopes of box-office gelt and Oscar gold, Up in the Air, opened in limited release. (Read "The Blind Side: What's All the Cheering About...