Prediction!

If spot silver remained steady at or around $35? Yeah, that would greatly slow down or stop my buying for a while.

HOWEVER, if we're at QE4 six to twelve months from now and the outlook worsens, then a $35 spot might start looking really cheap, too.

There are just so many factors to consider, it's hard to make a blanket statement on buying or holding.

Agreed! This is one of those classic cases where those who know aren't talking and those who are talking don't know.



True enough. The problem here is that the Fed is getting a lot trickier with their descriptions of what is and what is not QE. This whole thing about doing the currency swaps with the ECB still has me scratching my head. It looked a lot like taking money from one pocket, putting it into another pocket, and then saying, "See, all fixed!". Huh? What exactly was fixed by doing that? Nothing that I can see. It's just more of the same financial slight of hand that helped get us into this mess in the 1st place. Doing more of what caused a problem rarely, if ever, solves it.

I wish that I could say that some really smart people are addressing the US, European, and world financial problems but I can't. They seem to be ing big-time. By wasting a lot of time via can kicking, they have virtually guaranteed that the solutions to these problems either won't be found at all or they will be as painful and dragged out as possible. Some choice!

Worse.
They are issuing debt and calling it hard money in a scheme to rob both Peter and paul

Bruce... I agree with everything in your post and would also like to have a crystal ball that would let me in on what the future holds. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be one available. Given that, then it is up to us to do some general prep that will (hopefully) work well enough in whatever situation develops. One scenario that is almost never mentioned, but which seems to be more and more likely with time, is a military take-over of the civilian government under the auspices of returning the country to its founding principles. We seem to have gotten rather far away from those, especially of late, and this is causing a lot of political, social, and economic problems. I'm not saying that this is what I am hoping for or that it is the best solution but it certainly could be A solution. Although it would likely be pretty messy, I would rather see this happen than to have to put up with King Obama I.

As to PMs, political and economic uncertainty and collapse should favor them as the only remaining and viable form of exchange for goods and services. I think that a lot of people would be amazed at just how quickly these would come out of the woodwork and be accepted as the real money that they are.

I don't like getting into the Democrat/Republican dichotomy issue, but it's important to remember that all this extra surveillance and government intrusion didn't begin in 2008. Too many of us get distracted by the Dems vs. Reps and their ostensible differences. IMO, that's a red herring. A mechanism used to divide and keep us conquered. Think about how divided we are today compared to just thirty years ago? Surveys from that era typically showed that the vast majority of Americans considered themselves politically moderate, centrists. Now we're either Fox News loving Republicans or Obama worshiping Democrats, and both sides are indoctrinated on a daily basis to detest the other. But ask yourself why? What was the catalyst for people drifting to the very edges of the political spectrum from the center? Red state and blue state? When did we stop being plain old Americans? And who benefits from all the divisiveness? More importantly, what's the goal? The beginning of the end of the republic will be traced by the historians of the future to 2001. Homeland Security. Patriot Act. TSA. FEMA. Operation TIPS. ECHELON. All well constructed cogs that make up our quiet police state. In many ways, I'm afraid the terrorists have already won and "we the people" lost, big time. How? Our government took advantage of a crisis to exert a new level of control on its citizens that was never theirs to take.

And how does this related to PMs? It's hard to collect silver with lead on your mind.

Two things must happen:

Voters must understand that everything "given" them has to be paid for, and there's only three options:

• New taxes
• Cut back something else
• Print worthless (and worth less) money.

Politicians have to understand that buying votes has the same consequences.

I'm still waiting for silver to drop back to around $30 so I can buy (with my wife's approval) another monster box of silver. Perhaps Canadian Maple Leafs this time around. Sadly, the way silver is performing today, I may have missed the boat...