p.s. Thomas Sowell's book, "The Vision of the Anointed" goes into a lot of detail on the evils of social engineering policies and their unintended consequences. It's a very good read, highly recommended - and I would suggest getting it in physical form as it's likely high on the list of th...

18 months ago I would have considered this thought crazy, but like the open US border, has it occurred to anyone that the Afghanistan result was desired? Nah I don't think so. The main difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats firmly believe that social engineering is possible ...

Xan and MangoMan were talking about using I Bonds as a short term strategy, so the inconvenience factor does indeed weigh heavily. I agree with you that I Bonds are a great long term repository for cash. The overall interest rate I'm getting on my I Bond stash, built up over the years, is quite plea...

I gather that the original point of the thread was whether Trump would have done better. It's hard to say of course. I will just say that from a policy standpoint, Trump did a LOT better than Biden - who has been consistently a hot mess from Day 1. The question of whether policy should outweigh pers...

Got it. So the minimum voting age should be 50!!

jhogue, you are brilliant!!!!! Thank you for that little fairy tale! Yes you're absolutely correct: if cash is running at a deficit wrt inflation it will indeed push up at least one of the other three assets, and I guess that's what's been happening. It doesn't mean that playing with TIPS to squeeze...

My mother's savings are heavily into individual stocks, and she's done quite well plus has a lot of losses built up so that she could probably sell the whole lot and not pay a penny in taxes. I'm a bit jealous! The index fund approach has its good points, but it sucks when it comes to tax liability...

Thanks jhogue! That chart is sobering indeed. On the other hand, 2% is not the end of the world, even though it does suggest that there is at least a theoretical scenario where a tips fund can lose more than that. The problem seems to be the premium/discount to NAV issue. Would a mutual fund be safe...

How about "anyone who is not a citizen" can't vote? That would be incendiary enough, since the Democratic Party is hell bent on giving the vote to illegal immigrants - to say nothing of green card holders, students here on a J-1 visa etc. The next question is whether there are groups of Am...

Yes well put Kbg! The PP is about protecting your nest egg, not striking it rich. One thing we'd all discussed is using the PP for "core" retirement savings, i.e. enough to live on, and any savings beyond that can be 100% stocks. If the stocks lose value or go flat for a decade like they h...

Nice analysis jhogue but I beg to differ just a bit.... The 4-5% spread between interest rates and inflation rate is absolutely 100% unprecedented, at least going back to 1970. It's too much of a gap to ignore, and there must be a way to exploit it to minimize the damage from a large cash holding. A...

A short term TIPS fund is not a bad idea at all as a cash holding, to supplement I bonds and treasury money market funds. We are in an unprecedented situation where the gap between nominal interest rates and inflation is exceeding 4%, approaching 5%. I bonds are not quite filling the gap, with their...

Well said vincent! It's not just about the gold. It's how those three volatile asset classes were chosen to be as uncorrelated with each other as it's possible to get. All other asset classes are either strongly correlated with one of them (e.g. the different stock classes), or correlate with a mix ...

My current favorite from the Babylon Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/governor-abbot-approval-rating-skyrockets-after-getting-dozens-of-democrats-to-leave-texas/ And I posted this before but it's still hilarious. Jon Stewart is refreshingly untied to any particular political ideology, and here's the...

Do Dems want a race war? Oh hell yeah. For decades, the dems viewed minorities as a permanent underclass that could always be counted upon to sell their vote for the promise of a welfare check. Now they're viewed as the instrumentality by which civil society will once and for all be broken and gove...

Hilarious series of videos from Reason TV: Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. Enjoy!! And I can't wait to see what will happen with Biden's new multi-trillion spending plan, with the best of intentions....what could possibly go wrong?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSwMEtuL-GQ&list=PLBu...

He does in fact include "nuisance crimes" on his priority list. He was one of the original architects of the "broken windows" philosophy, and he intends to bring that back. His platform on homelessness is not too well developed. Something about repurposing empty office buildings ...

I guess we'll see how this plays out. I might have been convinced about a general shift to the left, but the degree to which polls have been consistently biased to the left, plus the NYC primary results are telling a different story. It looks like Eric Adams, who despite being vilified in the mainst...

I didn't want to get into that degree of specificity, but yes to all of that. As far as Idaho and the other transplant states: What will happen when they all inevitably go blue in 2 decades? Will there then be a newer even further left color that will start (duh) in CA and then start infesting NY, ...

Negative real interest rates to this degree (> 4%) are almost unprecedented in the post gold era, but we can look to the 1970s when real rates were negative (2-3%) and occasionally higher for short periods of time. The answer was that the PP did incredibly well in the 1970s because gold responded ve...

One could just replace the long/short Treasury barbell with mostly ITT's and a smattering of iBonds and call it a day (that's what I've done for now), or if younger and still years away from retirement use EE and iBonds for the entire bond/cash allocation since they're the only Treasury securities ...

I just tried Tortoise's link, and now it's working.

It says you can file if you sold physical gold sometime between 2004 and June 30, 2013. Guess when my gold sale was? July 22, 2013. D'OH!!!!!!!!!!!

The gods seem determined to be unkind to me lately....

Thanks Tortoise but it came up with an error....

FWIW, APMEX said they're not aware of any such class action suit.

I didn't get any paperwork in the mail, because the only gold I sold in that time period was physical (to APMEX). I did that to tax loss harvest, and it was a reasonably large amount - so I have the documentation and theoretically all I need to file a claim. I wrote to APMEX (where I sold the coins)...

Brilliant idea, to run on a Republican platform but as a Democrat. It might just work if he says all the right woke-like things in between bursts of common sense. Then those common sense ideas won't be as readily smearable by tagging them with words like "Republican" and "Trump"....