If it is their first defensive quality weapon, good swap. If they have a good armory and this was a ‘play piece’ I think he did it too early as precious metals haven’t finished their climb.
For you…likely a good deal as you have the gold in hand and as I said earlier, precious metals are not done climbing.
The problem with the precious metal crowd is that they fail to realize that if the economy takes a real nose dive, no one will be willing to part with practical items (firearms, food, etc.) in exchange for gold or silver (while it is valuable, it is impractical as a means of defense or food.)
In this case, you are fairly well set as far as the defensive armaments go, so it makes sense to store a reasonable amount of precious metals.
Considering everything involved here, I think that you both got a good deal in this transaction.
Precious metals are a store of wealth. Fiat money ALWAYS collapses and there is always a reset. Precious metals will be worth X amount of the new currency vs little or no value of the Federal Reserve Notes. Definitely worthless though if you don’t have food, water etc for the transition period.
A thoughtful merchant NEVER states what another has purchased or paid. This really is an even more important axiom in the defensive arms industry.
Respect the customer’s PERSEC. Would you want someone broadcasting that you just purchased X, Y and Z for amount A?
I hate to jump in the middle of this… Grant never mentioned who the customer was so if he were to say Customer X purchased A, B and C then it really isn’t giving up much in terms of PERSEC.
The apparency of inflation is that prices, like oil for example, are going up. But the actual value of products and services is not going up. The dollar is going down in value and so it takes more of them to buy the same product or service. This is not the case with gold. In 1900 one ounce of gold would buy you a very nice men’s suit in London. Gold was about 20 dollars an ounce then. Today you can buy a very nice men’s suit in London for one ounce of gold.
This is a version of a very old description of precious metals vs inflation. Having some pm is a good idea in my opinion.
PM is gold, silver, platinum and sometimes lead (in the proper configuration;)).
As has already been stated, it depends on the scenario how useful the pm will be. In a TEOTWAWKI scenario, pm won’t be useful/valuable until some form of society and trade has been reestablished, if ever. In a more reasonable/higher likelihood type of situation like what happened to Argentina (link here), having pm makes a ton of sense imho.
One thing for sure, versus stocks or a lot of other assets, your buddy got out of paying capital gains taxes on it so that is a pretty big financial benefit there. Assuming that he doesn’t claim it on his taxes, like he should.
I’ve heard of large finance entities actually taking physical possesion of gold, in their own facilities. I wonder if this is to take advantage of gold liquidity, like cash, but not loose out on gold’s recent resistance to inflation. You can move it around easier than paper assests with out all the financial paper work.
I see these ‘investments’ as a spectrum. Things like Gold or silver work until things get to a certain level of badness. Fiat money, gold and silver all rely on the expectation that someone in the future will value it near what value you place on (or what you traded for it). Gold and silver have the advantage that they are useful in and of themselves, where fiat money makes poor tiolet paper or kindling. Rarity doesn’t really matter that much. Lots of stuff is rare, doesn’t mean that people will value it.
As too the timing issue, maybe he got spooked by the recent drop in the price of gold. I don’t see TEOTWAWKI immenent, but if it gets here, its too late then.
Don’t broadcast this very far… the Wall Street Hedgefund guys will hear about it and arbitrage the price of ARs in dollars vs gold and set up a trading program to take advantage of the disparity.