100/5000

One hundred dollars for an ounce of silver.

Five thousand dollars for an ounce of gold.

That's where we're at now.

Inflation has been the normal state of affairs since before I was born, so none of this is surprising.  There were predictions of gold reaching the 3000-5000 dollar range by 2020 back around the turn of the century when the dot-com bubble burst and the commodity boom was just getting started.  Guys like Marc Faber and Jim Rogers were way ahead of the curve on this.

Of course, if you had put all your money in gold back then, you would have missed out on the bull runs in real estate and stocks and the associated yields/dividends you would have collected along with the capital gains.  I haven't crunched the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if you'd have done just as well by parking your money in an index fund in 2002 and just sitting on it for the next 24 years.

In any event, gold and silver are going parabolic now, and I can't help but wonder, "Why now?  Why not a couple of years ago when it looked like de-dollarization was moving forward across the globe?"  And I frankly don't have an answer for that.

All I know is that the precious metals are not cheap right now, and I won't be buying any time soon.  Oil is cheap, and a few other things are "cheap enough," but I'm not jumping on the gold/silver bandwagon.