What I think of Metal Coins

It's not that my dad hates Asians. He just thinks there's a scientific reason Asian houses keep getting burgled - everyone knows they keep precious objects at home.

This is why I'm very reluctant to get buttloads of gold and silver coins. Representing that much value with an object that small and that easy to loose would make me go crazy - Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type crazy. Add to that my inborn love for anything shiny and diskoid, and you get a real-life Shylock.

My dad has a friend who likes to give me advice whenever he's around, and once he gave me advice on how to store my hard assets. I'm to get a safe that's so heavy it's immobile, and if I can't dish out enough money for that I'm to find a discrete place in the back yard where I can burry my gold watchs, necklaces, and coins.

This must be one of the reasons "right"-libertarians are uber-gun-lovers. God forbid a common burglar stumble upon half their life savings. I'm not saying that fecetiously. I sincerely would feel heartache for anyone who lost their booty to a thief.

Isn't this what banks are supposed to be for in the first place? You'd think the market demand for secure places to keep precious objects would produce a lucrative way to delegate the safekeeping of my metals. But alas, we are screwed yet again.

If I get a deposit box in a bank to keep my coins in, I'd basically be renting storage with armed guards. My coins won't get much more valuable than inflation would make them, since I won't be making interest off of them. Paying a regular fee while not earning interest = loss.

Thanks to legal tender, you can't bank in gold. If you make a loan in gold, your debtor's only obliged to pay you back in that inflationary currency we're all trying to cushion ourselves against, and you're obliged to accept it. Sure, you can save all the gold you want; you just can't earn the interest on it to pay the cost of someone else keeping it safe.

Now, since you can't bank in gold, you can't use it as a monetary unit. If the coin is to be money, you have to be able to buy little things with it. Unless you can make a silver coin small enough to worth $1.50, you'll have to be able to cary receipts that represent that small amount of metal. And since no one banks in gold, those receipts don't exist.

If you can't lend in it and you can't buy in it, well then why think of it as an alternative currency? Maybe soon we'll see the emergence of a (probably black market) bank where people earn interest in metal off the loans they make in metal. Or maybe it already exists and I just haven't heard of it yet. If you know of it, or if you can convince me that keeping metal in a deposit box can increase the "real" value of my stuff, please tell me cause I really want to know.

And besides - I have no income and I'm paying off my student debt. I can't be buying metal when Wachovia owns my soul. Gold and silver coins' virtue is their ability to preserve a general amount of wealth over a long period of time, and due to the present circumstances my mind's set on the very opposite of that.