The Value of Precious Metals

Disclaimer: This is a Blogitive sponsored post.

I haven't accepted any offers for sponsored posts at Blogitive before, and almost skipped this one too. But then I read the "web release" associated with this site, and the story it told hooked me enough to want to click the link and find out more about it. So I thought I'd share:

Remember when gas was only 25-cents a gallon? You could take a dollar down to the gas station and buy four gallons for a buck! At that time our dollar was backed by REAL money, real silver. Guess what? That same amount of silver still buys four gallons of gas! That just shows that real money like gold and silver holds its value and it is the green paper money that is now worth a lot less. As a matter of fact, when you think about it, you realize that gas, food, and almost everything else has NOT gotten more expensive. It only seems that way because the value of the green paper money is worth less and less and so it takes more and more of it to buy the same goods and services. Most people think prices have gone up, but in reality: it is the value of the US dollar that has actually gone down.

Now personally, I'm not old enough to remember when gas was 25 cents a gallon, but I did a bit of research, and back that was the price back in the mid-1950's. Then I did a bit more research, and found out that if you bought that gas with a silver dollar coin, or a $1 silver certificate (redeemable for a silver dollar coin), those 4 gallons of gas would cost you 0.7734 troy ounces of silver (I'm talking about real silver dollars, not the ones from the 1970's with Pres. Eisenhower on them that were made of a copper-nickel alloy). And it turns out that today 0.7734 troy ounces of silver is worth about $10 -- enough to buy 4 gallons of gas and even get back a little change!

With the price of gold at record highs, I don't know that it's the ideal time to buy a bunch of coins or gold bars or something, and I can't afford to buy the kinds of quantities they sell at Monex, but the idea of investing some of my online earnings in precious metals (even if it's in the form of old silver coins) is definitely intriguing.

Tags: gold, gold standard, gold coins, silver coins