Scarily Accurate Magazine Rip-Offs

You know how in the first Men in Black movie, it was revealed that everything in the tabloids was true as a joke? I've been looking through the last 20 years of National Geographic and those ads for overpriced bullion have been interesting. Some former rip-offs have matured into fantastic deals, and occasionally the pagefuls of fluff they write to rope in well-meaning or paranoid newcomers to buy turn out to be deadly accurate. Here are a few of my favorites (will be updated as I go through more magazines).

First, though, I should give some marketing tactics: most ads deal in 1/10th ounce Gold Eagles, typically inflated to look even bigger than the Silver Eagles sometimes placed next to them (even though gold has a higher density than silver). This probably works because most people have a vague recollection that America had silver dollars at one point and they were pretty darn big, so obviously a $5 coin is going to be bigger, and they think that even if the ad is oversized they'll get something bigger than a tiny 1/10th ounce. The worst offender I've seen yet, though, is a 0.5 gram gold Kangaroo inflated to about half the page in DISCOVER. You'd have to be pretty cynical to imagine an ad lying that much about a coin's size if you didn't read the "ACTUAL SIZE: 11 mm" and "0.5 gram of gold" in the corner.

But enough of that, here are some prices and unintentionally hilarious/accurate excerpts:

June 2004
U.S. MINT 2004 FIRST RELEASE GOLD & SILVER EAGLES

RIGHT NOW, FOR A LIMITED TIME, WE ARE OFFERING THE FIRST 2004 [in June?] GOLD AND SILVER EAGLES OFF THE U.S. MINT PRESSES AT ABSOLUTE DEALER COST. IT'S A FACT.

THE BRILLIANT UNCIRCULATED $5 GOLD EAGLE CAN BE YOURS FOR ONLY $45.00*

THE $1 SILVER EAGLE IS PRICED AT ONLY $8.50**

I think anyone would buy these in an instant nowadays. Unfortunately, they list the spot prices they were basing these off of in the footnotes: $390 for gold and $6.70 for silver. So you're paying 15% markup per coin. It's just funny to see an ad and actually think "wow, that's a good price even after markup".

But I only listed this to set the stage, because it's pretty standard (although there's some pretty diverse stuff, even heavily marked-up slabbed world coins) for a vintage gold advertisement. The really stunning ones are the ads that were completely right. Behold:

August 2004
U.S. GOV'T GOLD
REAGAN'S GREATEST LEGACY

Thank you President Reagan for the most beautiful Gold coins ever minted, the Gold American Eagles.

The first part of this seemed like typical "oh no everything is collapsing buy gold" worry-mongering, but at the end was a surprise.

GOLD MARKET EXPLODES
Times were different when President Reagan was in the White House. Today the war on terror and the escalating violence in Iraq are daily news events. Add to the equation over 8,000,000 (8 million) unemployed Americans, rampant corporate fraud, out of control government spending, the inability to balance the budget and you have an insurmountable debt that tops $7 Trillion [cute] and continues to grow each and every minute. President Reagan understood the need to protect the American public. One of his strategies was to make it easy for everyone to own Gold. This vision was absolutely correct. The Gold Market has outperformed the S&P 500 for the past five years. In addition, the performance of CD's and savings accounts can't even come close to the gains that Gold has made. This is why now is the time to move paper assets into Gold. It is crucial that individuals move now because as soon as tomorrow,

Gold could start it's [sic] predicted steep rise from $390 to $1,500 per ounce.

And to think that was far-fetched enough to put into a dodgy ad 10 years ago!