Video game publisher THQ has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will seek a buyer to help it recover from years of business and creative missteps.
The Agoura Hills company, best known for the "Saint's Row" franchise and World Wrestling Entertainment licensed games, is working with private investment firm Clearlake Capital Group, which has agreed to enter a $60-million "stalking horse" bid for THQ's U.S. assets. Any would-be suitor for THQ would have to offer more than that.
Valued at $2 billion as recently as 2007, THQ's market value at the end of trading Tuesday was about $11.3 million.
Once THQ's largest source of profit, the market for kids' games based on licenses from companies such as Pixar and DreamWorks Animation has virtually evaporated.
An effort to revive its kids business with a device called UDraw proved a disaster. THQ vastly overestimated demand for it on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles during the 2011 holiday season.
Amid ongoing layoffs, product cancellations, and the sale or shutdown of many of its production studios, THQ has tried to stay alive by focusing on so-called hard-core action titles aimed at the biggest spending young male gamers.
But while a few such as "Saints Row the Third" and "Homefront" have sold decently, others like "Darksiders II" and "Red Faction: Armageddon" performed poorly.
In May it hired a new president, video game industry veteran Jason Rubin, to oversee production and help the company find a way out of its death spiral of falling stock price and a shortage of capital.
In November it began working with Centerview Partners, a financial advisory firm that has close ties to Rubin.
As it continues to operate in Chapter 11, THQ has obtained commitments for about $37.5 million of debtor-in-possession financing from Clearlake and Wells Fargo.
It has several games in the works for 2013, the most highly anticipated of which is "South Park: The Stick of Truth," based on the long-running Comedy Central show.
“The sale and filing are necessary next steps to complete THQ’s transformation and position the company for the future, as we remain confident in our existing pipeline of games, the strength of our studios and THQ’s deep bench of talent," chief executive Brian Farrell said in a statement.
Added Rubin: "We have incredible, creative talent here at THQ. We look forward to partnering with experienced investors for a new start as we will continue to use our intellectual property assets to develop high-quality core games, create new franchise titles, and drive demand through both traditional and digital channels."
A group of ANC delegates from the North West told NewsFire they were illegally detained and beaten by police, and that their accommodation in Bloemfontein was searched without a warrant.
These delegates are aligned with the "Forces of Change" faction of the party and were denied accreditation at the beginning of the ANC's elective conference in Mangaung.
According to the group, police arrived at their house in Bloemfontein on Wednesday afternoon. Police were allowed onto the property, yet proceeded to kick down the door to the house and search it.
Police claimed to be looking for "weapons and heavy weapons", but found nothing.
In the course of the raid, the people in the house were told by police to strip off their shirts and were then taken outside and forced to lie on the ground, where their hands were bound behind their backs with cable ties. One person, too scared to allow NewsFire to use his name, claims that he was kicked in the mouth by police.
NewsFire saw at least two people at the Central police station in Bloemfontein, attempting to lay charges.
A resident at the delegates' house said that this raid followed a raid on Monday in which police without a warrant wanted to search the house and cars for weapons, which the delegates allowed. Nothing was found.
Volksblad reported on the Monday raid earlier in the week, saying that a group of ANC delegates were targeted by heavily armed police looking for weapons.
Delegates detained in Wednesday’s raid told NewsFire that the raid was conducted by regular South African Police Service (SAPS) officers accompanied by men in camouflage uniform and wearing balaclavas.
The only police unit known to wear camouflage uniform is the Strategic Task Force, an elite unit of less than a hundred members countrywide, who undergo rigorous training akin to the military reconnaissance unit.
The delegates from the North West are aligned with the "Forces of Change" faction of the ANC who are opposed to President Jacob Zuma's second term as ANC preThe power of such an explosion was incredible. Picks, shovels, sledgehammers, rocks, lumps of coal, empty coal-cars and human bodies were flung down the tunnels like pellets in the barrel of a shotgun. The electric power was snuffed out and the fans which pushed air into the mines were bent and put out of action. Not infrequently fires were started in the coal seams and the sulphurous fumes contaminated the whole area. Men who had escaped the vengeance of the explosion might then die from suffocation.
In the gloomy half-darkness of the mines men were sometimes caught between moving cars and the supporting timbers, and their bodies and limbs mangled horribly. Sometimes a hapless miner was caught between the top of a loaded coal-car and the periodic collar-poles which supported the roof. The space between the top of the car and the bottom of the horizontal collar-poles was rarely more than six or eight inches. As the car was pulled along the track, the miner's body was "rolled" very much as a pencil may be rolled between one's hands, crushing ribs, pelvis and shoulder bones to bits.
Within a few years after the mines were opened electric locomotives began to replace the horses and mules which pulled the underground trains of coal. Power for those machines came from naked cables suspended from the tunnel roofs. The wire was never more than a foot or so above the motorman's head; many motor operators accidentally touched it and were electrocuted. Other miners straightened up at an unfortunate moment, or stumbled over cross-ties and touched the deadly cable. The consequence was always death or serious injury.
But the most frequent accidents were the roof falls. Most of the coal in the plateau has a slate bottom with a layer of sandstone on top. This overlying sandstone is separated from the coal by a shield of slate, sometimes two or three feet thick. This soft slate adheres weakly to the sandstone. It could be held up only by numerous stout timbers or, in more recent years, by steel roof bolts. With startling frequency huge slabs of the slate broke loose from the sandstone and, splintering oak collar-poles and hickory jack props, crashed onto the heads of the miners, crushing their bodies against the muddy floor. Many miners who worked through this era used crowbars and jacks to raise tons of fallen rock from the flattened bodies of their fellow workmen. An aged Negro once related to me how he and two of his "buddies" loaded the pancake-flat remains of a foreman and two miners into a coal car for removal to the outside. Their bodies, he said, were ground into the floor and the miners scraped them loose with their huge coal shovels. As he put it, "We had to jest shovel 'em up." But such slate falls were not always fatal. Often they crushed spines, arms and legs and left the miners grotesquely mangled and twisted.
The black powder used in the mines was another dreadful breaker of men. The fire-train fuse so widely employed before the electric fuse replaced it was not always reliable, and the spitting trail of fire sometimes diminished to a slow smolder inside the tamped hole. After waiting a long interval for the fire to eat its way to the charge and thinking the shot had failed, the disappointed miner approached his working place "to pull the charge." All too many times he arrived just as the fire ate its way into the charge of powder, and with a roar tons of coal were blasted at him. Men were slain in this way and others were reduced to lifelong cripples. Still others were blinded by particles of fine coal which were thrown into their unprotected eyes.
2012年12月19日星期三
2012年11月25日星期日
18 seasons of teaching players
It’s a Friday night and the lights are on over the Souhegan High School football field.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
2011年4月21日星期四
Debunking Anti-Gold Propaganda
A meme is now circulating that gold is in a bubble and that it's time for the wise investor to sell. To me, that’s a ridiculous notion. Certainly a premature one.
It pays to remain as objective as you can be when analyzing any investment. People have a tendency to fall in love with an asset class, usually because it’s treated them so well. We saw that happen, most recently, with Internet stocks in the late ‘90s and houses up to 2007. Investment bubbles are driven primarily by emotion, although there's always some rationale for the emotion to latch on to. Perversely, when it comes to investing, reason is recruited mainly to provide cover for passion and preconception.
In the same way, people tend to hate certain investments unreasonably, usually at the bottom of a bear market, after they've lost a lot of money and thinking about the asset means reliving the pain and loss. Love-and-hate cycles occur for all investment classes.
But there’s only one investment I can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions – especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. Let’s spend a moment looking at how gold’s fundamentals fit in with the psychology of the current market.
What Gold Is – and Why It’s Hated
Let me first disclose that I’ve always been favorably inclined toward gold, simply because I think money is a good thing. Not everyone feels that way, however. Some, with a Platonic view, think that money and commercial activity in general are degrading and beneath the “better” sort of people – although they’re a little hazy about how mankind rose above the level of living hand-to-mouth, grubbing for roots and berries. Some think it’s “the root of all evil,” a view that reflects a certain attitude toward the material world in general. Some (who have actually read St. Paul) think it’s just the love of money that’s the root of all evil. Some others see the utility of money but think it should be controlled somehow – as if only the proper authorities knew how to manage the dangerous substance.
From an economic viewpoint, however, money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value. Efforts to turn it into a political football invariably are a sign of a hidden agenda or perhaps a psychological aberration. But, that said, money does have a moral as well as an economic significance. And it’s important to get that out in the open and have it understood. My view is that money is a high moral good. It represents all the good things you hope to have, do and provide in the future. In a manner of speaking, it’s distilled life. That’s why it’s important to have a sound money, one that isn’t subject to political manipulation.
It pays to remain as objective as you can be when analyzing any investment. People have a tendency to fall in love with an asset class, usually because it’s treated them so well. We saw that happen, most recently, with Internet stocks in the late ‘90s and houses up to 2007. Investment bubbles are driven primarily by emotion, although there's always some rationale for the emotion to latch on to. Perversely, when it comes to investing, reason is recruited mainly to provide cover for passion and preconception.
In the same way, people tend to hate certain investments unreasonably, usually at the bottom of a bear market, after they've lost a lot of money and thinking about the asset means reliving the pain and loss. Love-and-hate cycles occur for all investment classes.
But there’s only one investment I can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions – especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. Let’s spend a moment looking at how gold’s fundamentals fit in with the psychology of the current market.
What Gold Is – and Why It’s Hated
Let me first disclose that I’ve always been favorably inclined toward gold, simply because I think money is a good thing. Not everyone feels that way, however. Some, with a Platonic view, think that money and commercial activity in general are degrading and beneath the “better” sort of people – although they’re a little hazy about how mankind rose above the level of living hand-to-mouth, grubbing for roots and berries. Some think it’s “the root of all evil,” a view that reflects a certain attitude toward the material world in general. Some (who have actually read St. Paul) think it’s just the love of money that’s the root of all evil. Some others see the utility of money but think it should be controlled somehow – as if only the proper authorities knew how to manage the dangerous substance.
From an economic viewpoint, however, money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value. Efforts to turn it into a political football invariably are a sign of a hidden agenda or perhaps a psychological aberration. But, that said, money does have a moral as well as an economic significance. And it’s important to get that out in the open and have it understood. My view is that money is a high moral good. It represents all the good things you hope to have, do and provide in the future. In a manner of speaking, it’s distilled life. That’s why it’s important to have a sound money, one that isn’t subject to political manipulation.
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