Fiat Currencies vs Gold. The Shiny Metal Is Kicking Butt!

Whether you invest in precious metals or not, the fact of the matter is: Gold is history's best hedge against currency instabilities and worthless monies printed and minted out of thin air.

Figures courtesy of GoldSilver.com

Through the 3rd quarter of 2011 gold appears to be running away with another annual victory in value!

Thus far in 2011, gold has appreciated 17.2% versus 75 fiat currencies from around the world. 

Kenyan Schillings, South African Rands, and Turkey Lira have been the biggest losers to gold thus far in 2011, down over 42%, 38%, and 37% respectively to the yellow metal's value.

 

Currency vs. 1 oz. Gold	1-Jan-11			30-Sep-11	% Gold + / -
Afghanistan Afghanis	61,158			78,334	28.1%
Albania Leke	148,940			168,907	13.4%
Algeria Dinars	104,548			121,100	15.8%
Argentina Pesos	5,642			6,819	20.9%
Australia Dollars	1,389			1,663	19.8%
Bahamas Dollars	1,421			1,621	14.1%
Bahrain Dinars	536			611	14.0%
Bangladesh Taka	100,212			121,789	21.5%
Barbados Dollars	2,843			3,242	14.0%
Bermuda Dollars	1,421			1,621	14.1%
Brazil Reais	2,359			3,004	27.3%
Bulgaria Leva	2,081			2,358	13.3%
CFA BEAC Francs	696,322			791,051	13.6%
Canada Dollars	1,418			1,684	18.8%
Chile Pesos	664,883			846,118	27.3%
China Yuan Renminbi	9,369			10,348	10.4%
Colombia Pesos	2,722,077			3,119,868	14.6%
Comptoirs Français Francs	126,675			143,908	13.6%
Costa Rica Colones	715,132			824,665	15.3%
Croatia Kuna	7,844			9,041	15.3%
Czech Republic Koruny	26,558			29,783	12.1%
Denmark Kroner	7,913			8,974	13.4%
Dominican Republic Pesos	52,878			61,845	17.0%
East Caribbean Dollars	3,838			4,377	14.0%
Egypt Pounds	8,252			9,673	17.2%
Euro	1,062			1,206	13.6%
Fiji Dollars	2,632			2,991	13.6%
Hong Kong Dollars	11,049			12,620	14.2%
Hungary Forint	295,818			353,038	19.3%
IMF Special Drawing Rights	923			1,038	12.5%
Iceland Kronur	163,538			191,474	17.1%
India Rupees	63,539			79,566	25.2%
Indonesia Rupiahs	12,793,050			14,241,724	11.3%
Iran Rials	14,645,199			17,419,182	18.9%
Iraq Dinars	1,658,832			1,894,325	14.2%
Israel New Shekels	5,043			6,069	20.3%
Jamaica Dollars	120,397			139,007	15.5%
Japan Yen		115,351		124,882	8.3%
Jordan Dinars		1,006		1,149	14.2%
Kenya Shillings		114,427		162,592	42.1%
Kuwait Dinars		400		449	12.1%
Lebanon Pounds		2,132,175		2,437,455	14.3%
Malaysia Ringgits		4,384		5,175	18.1%
Mauritius Rupees		42,359		47,007	11.0%
Mexico Pesos		17,571		22,324	27.0%
Morocco Dirhams		11,842		13,494	14.0%
New Zealand Dollars		1,821		2,113	16.0%
Norway Kroner		8,273		9,469	14.5%
Oman Rials		547		623	13.9%
Pakistan Rupees		121,690		141,862	16.6%
Peru Nuevos Soles		3,987		4,495	12.7%
Philippines Pesos		62,032		70,957	14.4%
Poland Zlotych		4,209		5,321	26.4%
Qatar Riyals		5,175		5,903	14.1%
Romania New Lei		4,541		5,249	15.6%
Russia Rubles		43,322		52,183	20.5%
Saudi Arabia Riyals			5,331	6,080	14.1%
Singapore Dollars			1,826	2,110	15.5%
South Africa Rand			9,424	13,004	38.0%
South Korea Won			1,592,877	1,914,735	20.2%
Sri Lanka Rupees			157,696	178,602	13.3%
Sudan Pounds			3,551	4,339	22.2%
Sweden Kronor			9,554	11,062	15.8%
Switzerland Francs			1,328	1,468	10.5%
Taiwan New Dollars			41,421	49,452	19.4%
Thailand Baht			42,672	50,491	18.3%
Trinidad and Tobago Dollars			9,012	10,375	15.1%
Tunisia Dinars			1,992	2,322	16.6%
Turkey Lira			2,185	3,007	37.6%
United Arab Emirates Dirhams			5,221	5,955	14.1%
United Kingdom Pounds			911	1,038	13.9%
United States Dollars			1,421	1,621	14.1%
Venezuela Bolivares Fuertes			6,112	6,971	14.1%
Vietnam Dong			27,711,168	33,768,458	21.9%
Zambia Kwacha			6,794,531	7,854,166	15.6%

We Don't Need No Steenking Books - Great Essay On The Dummification of America

This perceptive treatise is an admonition to America. 

How can a nation preserve its prominence when the preponderance of her populace can’t even pronounce the words?

The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know. Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?
 

No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millenia. They cannot. They do not even know why.
 

Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the frist American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.
 

Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.
 

And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.
 

The things that have forever constituted civilization—respect for learning whether one had it or not, wide reading, careful use of language, manners, such notions as “lady” and “gentleman”--these are held in contempt.
 

Yet ours is a curious bleakness. Good things of everywhere and all time lie free for the having. When I was a child, you went to a library for books and the libraries often didn't have many. Today you can get even the Chinese classics, or those of Greece and Rome, or almost any book ever written in any language, from the web in five minutes. Do you want Marvin Minsky on finite automata? Papinian and Ulpian on Roman law? Balzac? Raymond Chandler? Tolkien? All are there. The same is true for any music, any painting, any movie, almost any historical curiosity: Ozzie and Harriet, Captain Video, Plastic Man. You can have cultivated friends in Kanmandu or Yuyuni in the Bolivian alitplano, and talk to them face-to-face with Skype.
 

This is news to no one. Yet it may prove important in ways we do not think. The internet allows an electronic community of those who have not been peasantrified. On the Web, learning and taste will live or, perhaps I should say, hide out. When there is no longer enough interest in books to support bookstores—they close now in droves—the residual demand integrated over the surface of the earth will provide enough of a market to keep the One True Bookstore, Amazon, going. Project Gutenberg will do the same for works not in copyright.
 

Things grow worse for the many but better for the few.
Odd: In one sense the internet is highly democratizing, giving any teenager in Tennessee resources greater than those of the Library of Congress. It does this euqally for a Cambodian teenager in Battambang. A bright youngster can learn almost anything with a cheap computer and broadband: mathematics, literature, languages.
 

The net also allows a terribly needed aristocracy, by which I mean not a govermental arrangement but the community of those of discrimination. They will shortly amount to a secret society, perhaps with a distinctive hand-shake for mutual recognition. It could become dangerous to speak correct English. It would indicate Elitism. We live in a society in which elitism is thought far more criminal than mere pederasty or cannibalism.
 

“Elitism” of course means only the principle that the better is preferable to the worse, but society today, except in matters of football, believes the worse to be preferable to the better. (One does not readily imagine a quarterback being urged to lower his passing percentage so as not to wound the self-esteem of his colleagues.)
 

It is literally true that the better is suspect. If you correct a high-school teacher's grammar, she will accuse you of stultifying creativity, of racism, of insensitiviy. If you reply that had you wanted your children brought up as baboons, you would have bought baboons in the first place, she will be offended.
 

Home-schooling, it seems to me, becomes a towering social responsibility. I have actually seen a teacher saying that parents should not let children learn to read before they reach school. You see, it would put them out of synch with the mammalian larvae that children are now made to be. Bright children not only face enstupiation and hideous boredom in schools taught by complacent imbeciles. No. They are also encouraged to believe that stupidity is a moral imperative.
 

Once they begin reading a few years ahead of their grade, which commonly is at once, school becomes an obstacle to advancement. This is especially true for the very bright. To putt a kid with an IQ of 150 in the same room with a barely literate affirmative-action hire clocking 85 is child abuse.
 

Essential, even crucial, to the preservation of civilization in the deepening gloom is a grim, intransigent determination not to apologize. You cannot cleanse the schools of teachers who barely speak English. The country is too far gone. But you needn't be cowed into regarding cretins as other than cretins. In front of your kids especially, don't be cowed. If your child in the second grade is readfing at the level of the sixth grade, she (I have daughters, which clouds my mind) she is superior. It is not that “she tests well,” with the subtle implication that testing well is some sort of trick, having nothing to do with intelligence, which doesn't exist. She is smart, literate, superior (oh, forbidden word).
 

She will have figured out the “smart” part anyway. You need only to let her know that smart is a good thing.
 

In an age of blinkered specializaton perhaps we should revive the idea of the Renaissance man. Today the phrase is quaint and almost condescending (though how do you condescend up?), arousing the mild admiration one has for a dancing dog. A time was when the cultivated could play an instrument, paint, knew something of mathematics and much of languages, traveled, could locate France, attended the opera and knew what they were attending. They wrote clearly and elegantly, this being a mark of civilization. I think of Benvenuto Cellini, born 1500, superb sculptor, professional musician, linguist, elegant writer, and good with a sword.
 

If there is any refuge, it is the internet. Let us make the most of it.