Glittering bait for the well-heeled shopper: Harrods department store has added gold bars to its merchandise line.
The store announced Thursday that it has joined with Swiss refiner Produits Artistiques Metaux Precieux to offer gold bars weighing 27.5 pounds (12.5 kilograms). The move comes as gold prices have been going through the roof. On Wednesday, they hit another record high of $1,072 an ounce.
Based on Thursday’s afternoon gold fixing price in New York, a gold bar would cost about $462,440. Customers can buy the gold through Harrods financial arm Harrods Bank, which is located in the central London’s department store.
“The financial environment has kindled a new demand for physical gold amongst private investors in Britain,” said Chris Hall, head of Harrods Gold Bullion. “Up until now, however, London has had no well-recognized name serving this market,” he added.
Many investors believe it is currently safer to invest in gold than in stocks, property, or currencies. “The fact that a company like Harrods is moving into the physical gold market is interesting ,” said Adrian Ash, head of research at Bullionvault.com, the online gold trading company. “It shows gold is moving back into the mainstream, having spent two decades in the arena of cranks and gold bugs.”
Mehdi Bakhordar, managing director of Produits Artistiques Metaux Precieux, said Harrods was the only location in London where investors could buy a 27.5 pound (12.5 kg) gold bar “off the shelf.”
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Quite the fashionable coffee table paper weight in Chester Square. As they’re from Switzerland, you can boast that they’re really melted Jewish teeth.
The same thing happened when it became legal to buy gold in America again. All these banks started dumping their gold on the market to drive the price down to “prove to those goldbugs that fiat currency was safer.”
We saw how that turned out when gold hit 800/oz in ’81.
Here is a writeup on a guy in Vegas who actually used gold coins for payroll.
Yeah I remember when gold hit $800 in `81. But didn’t come back down to almost half that? As far as the current price. Seems it’s been just above $1k for some months. So there’s no way of knowing if it will go up from $1072, or back down. And unless you can actually walk out with a real brick under your arm. The only only thing you’re likely to have paid for is some gold certificate or share. Which me you have an investment note based on some gold, someone else is holding onto. For everyone to have a bar of real gold, is impossible. There just isn’t enough of it to go around. Not even for a fraction of the world’s population. And after owning a bar (if you can), how do you manage to use it later? The only thing unique about gold, is that it’s not tied to any one nation’s economy, the way printed currency is.
BUT… if all nations’ currency is failing or falling in value. At some point you’re going to need to sell that gold to eat. What do you trade it for, and to whom, to buy a loaf of bread? So in the long run, you still end up dealing with a currency system. Unless banks are willing to buy the gold back, directly, and credit your Savings account to some value level agreed upon. But I haven’t heard of the banks planning to do this. None have done it before, to my knowledge. So don’t hold your breathe that they will come the next economic disaster.
This issue as noted is that I don’t have any way to get face value back if I do buy the stuff.
I would consider stuff like this, or those gold kiosks in Germany to be a sell signal. I’m quite of aware of the practical arguments against that, though.
Gold is one of the worst investments you can make, especially now seeing it will peak at best at 1200 per ounce. It is all down hill from there. If you buy at 1k and it slides just to 800 you lose.
Diamonds are just as bad unless they are uncut. The powers at De Beers makes the diamond market so stable they will not make you much on your investment.
All precious metals are only good if you get it low and wait for a crisis. Best bet are coloured precious gems in the 3 carat and up size. Gems like sapphires, rubies, tanzanite, alexandrite, etc. They are as easy to carry as diamonds and can fetch more money per carat than a diamond if you get good pieces. Just don’t buy them from those shopping channels as that is all crap and over-priced crap at that.
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Odd fact about gold, from National Geographic:
In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.
Anyone want to do a robbery??
I think some of you are missing the point about gold. Sure, you can use it buy things . . . if you can find someone to give you fiat currency for it. And the less that currency is worth, the more you’ll get for your chunk.
But gold is more than that. It is the single best indicator of the confidence in a nation’s currency — not day to day but over a longer term period. Whether the reasons are logic or not, that is how it is.