97 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The time is NOW for gold and silver investing!!!!, September 12, 2008
Mike has made a compelling case that sooner, rather than later, the US Dollar is going to tank and everyone will be running to gold and silver to protect their wealth. The good news is that NOW is the time to get in on both silver and gold- before the HERD of people start rushing in. Mike states that this opportunity coming could be the best investment in history.
The book starts off with the history of other empires that have used a fiat currency and how they have failed 100% of the time. The United States has been on this path since Aug, 1971 when President Nixon took us off the gold standard. There are a lot of interesting facts in this book but not too many to bore the reader. He explains that gold and silver will revalue themselves periodically in relation to the amount of paper currency printed. For example, the M3 money supply (total printed money in circulation) was ~$1.7 billion in January, 1980 when gold hit $850 an ounce. Today, the M3 is estimated at $14 trillion, a 7.7 times increase in the amount of currency. With that said, gold, when it adjusts, should be $6,118.00 an ounce...
Mike goes into today's current economic climate, then predictions for "tomorrow". He concludes with the final section "How to Invest in Precious Metals".
I recommend this book if you are unsure about silver and gold relating to investing. There's so much documentation and research behind it.
I've never read an investment book with this much passion put into it!!!
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266 of 299 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some good advice and several serious errors, February 23, 2009
This review is from: Rich Dad's Advisors: Guide to Investing In Gold and Silver: Everything You Need to Know to Profit from Precious Metals Now (Audio CD)
I listened to this as an audiobook because I am considering investing in precious metals and wanted to learn how to do it. This provides a lot of helpful "how to" information (including on a lot of the stuff that I had questions about, like where and how to store your precious metals once you have them) and some excellent advice on common pitfalls (example: those magazine offers that seem to show up all the time are usually a bad deal).
The "why" part of the book was a lot more mixed. While a lot of it is generally sound, some of it is really misleading. For example, in places he seems to imply that gold and silver always go up (they don't) and carry virtually no risk (actually, they can be really volatile).
There are a few significant points he doesn't cover. (As a quick caveat, the audiobook is abridged, so maybe a few of the things omitted in the audiobook were addressed in the full book; also, I will sometimes use "inflation" to mean "an increase in general prices" even though I know this isn't strictly accurate).
One of the most glaring omissions is a treatment of the actual price history of gold and silver. Specifically, if gold and silver are always such a reliable hedge against inflation, why is the correlation between inflation and the price of gold so unpredictable? Yeah, yeah, I've heard all the arguments about how the CPI is rigged (in fact, the author argues that in this book), and it probably is. But that still doesn't solve the problem. Consider:
1. Between 1980 and 2001, gold fell in price from $850 an ounce to $256 an ounce even though the CPI doubled; in order to maintain that gold had any correlation to this inflation, one would have to say that the government claimed we had substantial inflation while we were actually experiencing massive deflation.
Anyone who thinks we experienced that kind of deflation during almost all of Greenspan's tenure should have their head examined. A quick look at money supply data shows that the money supply did indeed steadily increase throughout this entire period, as it has almost every year since the Fed was created.
2. Gold went from $105 in 1976 to $850 in 1980. CPI was up by 28%.
3. Gold went from $256 in 2001 to $1001 in March 2008. CPI was up by about 20%.
As these facts show, even if CPI is rigged, there still isn't any reliable correlation between inflation and gold.
At this point it is worth asking exactly how the CPI is supposed to be rigged - does it overestimate inflation or underestimate it? In order to claim an infallible correlation between gold and inflation, one would have to claim that the CPI grossly understated inflation between 1976 and 1980, said there was inflation when there was actually significant deflation between 1980 and 2001, and then went back to grossly understating inflation again between 2001 and 2008.
Most people who claim that the CPI is rigged claim that it understates the actual amount of inflation (many claim that the "real" number is as much as two times higher), but if that's true it only makes the period between 1980 and 2001 an even greater exception to the supposedly infallible correlation between gold and inflation as this would mean that the nominal price of gold fell by more than two thirds while the rest of prices quadrupled.
The reason I spend so much time on this point is that it's such a serious flaw in his argument. Anyone who attempts to predict where the price of gold is headed ought to explain the price history; although he does admit that gold can be overvalued and undervalued in his treatment of cycles, I didn't find any systematic treatment of gold's actual price history. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, people reading this book can at times get the impression that precious metals can't go down or that they're always good proxies for inflation when in reality neither is the case.
Another serious error in the book is his claim that gold and silver are good investments during deflation. If gold reliably goes up in price during a period of inflation, it would go down in price during a period of deflation for exactly the same reason. Thus, either gold isn't a good hedge against inflation or it's a bad investment during a period of deflation; in either case, the book is wrong.
With that said, while I believe this is a serious omission that reduces the strength of his argument, I don't think this means we have to throw out his entire case for buying gold and silver. I believe you can still make a good case for buying gold and silver.
One final error: his claims that the price of gold is being manipulated by central banks and the derivatives market is essentially creating a "phantom supply" of precious metals (in other words, more gold and silver are sold on the derivatives market than actually exist). I'm not sure if he's correct on this point (I'm still researching that to see if it's true); however, if he is correct, it would seem to undermine a substantial part of his argument. If central banks have substantially manipulated the price of gold and silver in the past, they can continue to do so in the future, especially given that he argues that they have already engaged in price manipulation for a long time. So, why does this refute his argument? If central banks can dramatically manipulate the price of precious metals whenever they feel like it, there is never any guarantee that the price of precious metals has anything to do with its actual fundamentals. Thus, good fundamentals alone could never guarantee a good ROI - in other words, you could never know if gold or silver were going to be good investments because you could never know how central banks were going to manipulate the price.
In spite of several very serious errors and omissions, this book is worthwhile reading overall, especially in the "how" part, but don't uncritically accept all his claims.
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