We know a picture is worth a thousand words. But who cares what you are taking pictures of when you are taking them with this beautiful thing. Sixty of these gold-plated Leica’s are being made to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Communism in China. Talk about style.
Fit for a Bloggess! These gold plated Nike’s would cost £3500($5405). I would have to insist on some sort of discount. Now it may surprise some of you to know that I am a Reebok wearing, Adidas wearing, Converse wearing type of lady, see;
At present these are my favourite trainers, a metallic silver pair of Reebok trainers which I love and a red metallic pair of Reebok retro trainers which I equally adore. What is missing from my life is a pair of Gold trainers! An Adidas pair would be nice because when it comes to sportswear, Adidas reign supreme. Standard. But look what I found when I searched for gold trainers on google:
These Air Force One’s would set me back a few thousand pounds/US dollars so if you have come across a slightly cheaper pair of gold trainers recently, email me a picture or send details to: bloggess@allthingznice.com
The search for the golden trainers continues!
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Spot Gold Prices broke above $1300 an ounce early in London trade on Monday, pulling silver to new 30-year highs above $21.60 as world stock markets crept higher.
US crude oil contracts held north of $76 per barrel while the US Dollar recovered from new 5-month lows to the Euro, hit overnight in Asian trade.
Major economy government bonds rose, pushing interest rates down across the board and nudging 10-year UK gilt yields back below 3.00%.
“The conditions for the kind of sharp fall in Gold Prices that followed the 1970s’ bull market are entirely absent today,” said investment author and pension-fund manager Shayne McGuire this morning at the London Bullion Market Association’s annual conference.
After gaining 1000% in the previous 10 year, he said, gold only fell against a backdrop of “sky high interest rates, low equity valuations and – most importantly – low debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world.”
Held this year in Berlin – and again sold out, as in Edinburgh 2009 – the LBMA conference brings together 450 bullion-market professionals representing industry players from miners to refineries, assayers, bullion banks, vault operators, investors and analysts.
Chief executive Stewart Murray opened the two-day meeting by reminding last year’s delegates of their average Gold Price forecast for today’s event, “a bullish” but overly cautious $1181 per ounce.
By Sept. 2011, according to the attendees’ average forecast today, the Gold Price will reach $1406 per ounce – “marginally less bullish than last year,” as Dr.Murray noted.
Two issues dominate this year’s presentations – regulation of London’s “over the counter” physical bullion market, which the Association is working to “get ahead” by formalizing its forward-market data as chairman Kevin Crisp noted, plus the gathering pace of institutional Gold Investment.
“The financial crisis has created a seismic shift in Gold Investment,” said Graham Birch, former manager of the $3 billion Blackrock Gold & General fund, and now a non-executive director of Petropavlovsk.
“Institutional investors now worry about return of, rather than return on, their money,” said Birch, as well as expecting lower rates of return, suffering very poor interest rates on cash, acknowledging counterparty risk as a major concern, and needing to diversify across asset classes.
“Gold Price movements will continue to be dominated by investors,” Birch went on, noting that the last year of the Central Gold Bank Agreement – which expired Sunday, with an agreed ceiling for 400 tonnes of gold sales – saw Europe’s major holders unload only 6.2 tonnes of their Gold Bullion, a drop of 92% from the previous year.
“Gold is the ultimate financial insurance,” said Teachers Retirement System of Texas manager Shayne McGuire, “and pension funds are only just beginning to talk about this.”
Current pension fund allocations to gold stand around 0.3%, McGuire showed in his speech, with all physical Gold Investment now equal to perhaps 0.5% of the world’s total investable wealth.
That compares with 3% at the 1980 price peak, a level of 5% in 1968, and perhaps 20% or more prior to 1933.
“Investors should be positioning for ‘tail events’,” said former Bank for International Settlements and current OECD economic advisor William White in his keynote address to the LBMA conference.
Warning that government and central-bank policy responses to the financial crisis are both based on “uncertain” models – and “could lead to further bubbles” as they have since 1987′s October Crash in the stock market – White said he fears deflation ahead, with a clear possibility of a massive spike in inflation.
“Is there room for gold in investment portfolios in this kind of world? The answer, I think, is undoubtedly yes.”
Last week I woke up and literally wanted to get on a plane to any hot country. Felt tired and worn out as things were just not connecting properly, people not paying outstanding invoices, promises of “yes we will have one hundred units” and only taking one and then the cancellation of a meeting with a well-known film production company requiring 48 Gold iPads and guaranteed credits in a feature film.
By the time Friday came, I decided to “stop trying.” I booked into my local David Lloyds and spent the whole day there where I enjoyed the sauna, played tennis and had an amazing lunch followed by 3 hours sleep by the poolside – as I left this place of tranquility and healing my PA called to tell me:
Film production company wants me to do a cameo role in the film, supply 48 Gold iPads and be included in the credits
2 of my 5 outstanding invoices were paid
An order of 99 (32gb) Gold iPods from Kuwaiti Royal family representative was placed
I learnt again last week that like love, if things are just not working out for you, let it go and see if it comes back.
Found this interesting video on “Letting Go” that I would like to share with you.
THE PRICE OF GOLD came within 80¢ of $1300 an ounce Friday morning in London, with front-month gold futures in New York breaching that level, as trader-room rumors said the central banks of both Japan and Switzerland were actively selling their own currencies to depress them on the forex market.
US crude contracts oil rose back above $75 per barrel. World stock markets rose as the Dollar fell on the currency market.
Silver prices broke fresh three-decade highs above $21.40 an ounce.
“There is not a country in the world that wants a firmer domestic currency,” says Kamal Naqvi, head of commodity sales at Credit Suisse, speaking to the Financial Times today.
“The result is devaluing currencies against hard assets, and gold is the obvious barometer of that. The thesis of competitive devaluation as a driver for gold has become much more accepted by the mainstream.”
Just after lunchtime in Tokyo – which re-opened for business today after the autumnal equinox holiday – the US Dollar spiked almost ¥1 towards the ¥85.50 level achieved by last week’s Bank of Japan intervention, now estimated around $21 billion.
The Dollar quickly fell back to unchanged, however, and the Bank didn’t comment.
“There’s also been talk that the Swiss National Bank is buying Euros this morning,” said one London bullion dealer in a note, even as a new SNB survey said only a quarter of Swiss companies have suffered lower sales because of the rising Franc.
Eurozone investors wanting to buy gold today saw the price fall back towards €31,100 per kilo, while the single currency re-visited 24-week highs above $1.34 on the forex market.
By lunchtime in London, gold priced in Dollars stood 1.8% higher from last Friday’s finish. The gold price in Euros stood 1% down for the week.
“There the danger of a protectionist backlash” if each of the world’s big central banks seeks to depress their own currencies in “unilateral action”, says The Economist magazine today.
“It will also make it much harder to elicit further action from China, the country whose currency regime distorts the global economy most. The rich world needs reflating but the world economy also needs rebalancing. And that demands a weaker Dollar.”
So far this year, the Yen has risen 9.5% against the Dollar. Kept inside a tight trading-band set by the People’s Bank, in contrast, the Chinese Yuan has risen by only 1.4%.
In the first half of 2010, Beijing used some $20 billion of its $2.4 trillion foreign currency reserves to buy Japanese government bonds.
Beijing today denied a New York Times report that China is blocking exports of rare earth metals to Japan, but Tokyo’s finance minister repeated the claim.
“[Coming] economic data will be closely scrutinized to get an idea about the timing of possible Fed action,” reckons Commerzbank analyst David Schnautz, speaking to Bloomberg ahead of today’s US Durable Goods Orders report, which showed a 1.3% drop in August from July.
In US Treasury bonds, now completing their strongest week’s performance since the ‘safe haven’ buying of May’s Eurozone debt crisis, “The Federal Reserve may be more active on the buy side,” Schnautz’s believes.
“We don’t know how close they are to the trigger point” for fresh quantitative easing.
Formerly City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and head of editorial at the UK’s leading financial advisory for private investors, Adrian Ash is the editor of Gold News and head of research at BullionVault – winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation, 2009 and now backed by the mining-sector’s World Gold Council research body – where you can buy gold today vaulted in Zurich on $3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.
Please Note: This article is to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it.
Forget a watch, we want this around our wrist. This Castellani gold bracelet has four beautifully mounted scarabs. Apparently scarabs were so coveted that in 1862 Augusto Castellani commented that their high price ‘impelled the moderns to counterfeit them. And they so perfected this trade that the most experienced eye can barely discover the deception’.
