Word: gold
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gold is unlikely ever to be a great investment in the sense that buying into Microsoft in 1986 or Google in 2004 has been a great investment. The price of gold in dollars has more than quadrupled since the end of the long gold bear market in April 2001, but over the long run the return has averaged about 2% a year, says George Milling-Stanley, managing director for government affairs at the World Gold Council in New York. (That compares with about 8% for stocks.) It's less a ticket to riches than what Milling-Stanley calls an "insurance...
...past 38 years, the world has been engaged in the historical experiment of a monetary system based on a single currency (the U.S. dollar) that has no link to gold. This arrangement was shaky in its early days, in the 1970s, but seemed to work passably well for the next two decades. Lately, though, the dollar standard has been blamed for everything from China's huge buildup of dollars to the financial crisis of 2007 and '08 and a future of rampant inflation that hasn't materialized yet but that many doomsayers are convinced is on the way. And while...
...Gold is the one currency a central bank can't print," says Martin Murenbeeld, a veteran gold watcher who is chief economist for Canadian money-management firm DundeeWealth. Gold's big attraction as a pillar of the global monetary system is that it isn't beholden to national politics. The downside is that its supply increases fitfully, with no regard for the state of the world economy. That's why John Maynard Keynes called the gold standard a "barbarous relic," and why you won't find anyone outside the goldbug fringe calling for a full return to the gold standard...
...diverse region of the world, with at least 800 distinct local languages spoken by just 6.5 million people. Yet despite the tribal diversity, the nation is unified in at least one aspect: suspicion of foreign exploitation of its plentiful resources, ranging from natural gas and timber to fisheries and gold. Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where concerns over the environmental and economic effects of an Anglo-Australian-run copper mine sparked a secessionist struggle that claimed 15,000 lives over the course of a decade. (The mine, one of the world's largest open...
...immediately after a recession [Nov. 9]. But as I read on I realized that Klein's ideas were not only rational and sound, they accurately described the problem with government employees' massive advantage in health insurance, and how the powerful unions will negate any attempt to tax their "gold-plated health care plans." The article even brought me to shame when he stated that we're nowhere close to a reasonable discussion about taxes, as I myself would have argued intensively against any form of taxation. Thanks Joe Klein for making me more critically aware of my own ideology...