The Infomercial Told Me To Buy Gold

The infomercial I was watching early this morning told me to invest my money in gold. It's a wise investment, they say.

Now, I'm not that well-versed in economics. I know my Marxism and my Communist Manifesto. I know about the base and the superstructure, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the haves and the have-nots...all the philosophical, hyper-esoteric stuff. But that's really about it. I don't know of any practical use of economics. Specifically, I don't know anything about making my money grow into more money; I always associated that kind of thing with Business Majors. So when the infomercial told me that buying gold was in my best financial interest, I had little choice but to trust it.

The example they used seemed to make enough sense: the narrator had two piles of curreny, $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in gold coins. He reasoned that $50K in regular bills will still only be $50K. Even if it sits in a savings account, it's only going to accrue so many percentage points in a year's time...be it 1% or 2% or 7% or whatever. Now the $50K in gold coins, that has the potential to jump as high as -- depending on the market value for gold at any given time -- $160,000. Now I don't remember exactly how he arrived at that number (thinking back on it, it seems like an awfully arbitrary figure and I don't recall him giving any specific explanation why and how something like that would happen) but for someone who has as short an attention span for business-stuff as I do, all I cared about was how much I liked the sound of $160K. And the overall aesthetics of the presentation were very convincing: the narrator was standing in a bank vault; he had authentic-looking security guards standing behind him; and when the narrator picked up a handful of the gold coins and let them spill back out onto the pile, they made a very pleasing clinking sound, the sound a slot machine would make if you hit the jackpot.

Now, of course it's a scam; it wouldn't be an infomercial if it were legit. But it sounded like it made perfect sense, and that's what mattered the most to me at the time. If I didn't bother to take the time to stop and a) weigh the pros and cons, b) consider all the ramifications, and c) ask for advice from anyone who had half a clue about these kind of things, then yeah, it could actually be a good idea.

Also, I've always considered the idea of people owning and buying gold to be unfathomable. Obviously, lots of people have some gold -- in the form of earrings, watches, necklaces, teeth, what have you. But the thought of someone owning lots of gold, like a big stack of bars or a chest full of coins, seems so whimsically unreal to me. When I think of gold, I think of pirates and conquistadors and royalty and Indiana Jones...not normal, everyday people. It just feels like something I more closely associate with the pillaging & plundering past, rather than our credit-or-debit present.

And naturally, for anyone in and around my age group, simply mentioning the word "gold" immediately brings to mind Scrooge McDuck diving into his big pool of gold and swimming around in it during the opening theme song of every episode of Duck Tales.