Bad Day For The Dollar – Great For Retailers!
Today was black friday and atleast in San Diego it seemed like everyone was out shopping like its going out of style. The local best buy had great deals on TVs. A buddy picked up 2 flat screens. One 32″ LCD HDTV for $475 [after a $400 discount] & another Plasma 47″ HDTV for $1000 [after a $700 discount]. Of course they only had about a dozen of these that sold out immediately but luckily we had friends camping out at various stores so with a few well placed phone calls he was able to get in on the action!
He tried to pursuade me to get one too, but I’m really happy with my 19″ regular TV! However I did buy a very nice laptop from Costco for under a $1000. The good thing about Costco is that if you aren’t satisfied you can return your purchase at any time. Apparently people have been abusing the system so for laptops the cutoff is 6 months.
Anyway, today was a particularly bad day for the dollar. It was down against most major currencies including the Euro, Yen, Swiss Franc, Aussie & NZ Dollar and Indian Rupee. Just in time to make my vacation to south east asia just a tad more expensive!
Like I’ve been harping on before, I think the easiest way to get out of the multi-trillion dollar debt is for the Feds to inflate the value out of the dollar. This will provide the necessary “soft” landing for real estate. And by soft I mean a 20-40% price drop on the coasts, as opposed to a 50-60% drop. I belive its a trend that will continue for the next year or so. This will likely result in commodity inflation while the economy experiences deflation in terms of manufactured products, squeezing margins, profitability and wages. Not a good sign. [of course, this is just my opinion and could be wrong]
Gold was also uptoday to $637 and Silver is up to nearly $13.50. Finally my gold & silver coins are coming back up in value. I bought a lot of old goin coins & a few new ones for almost the bullion price. I think my average price is around $668/oz. Not bad considering a few of them are roughly 100 years ago and 2 of them are in the 200 year range! My belief is that once gold starts its upward trend again, coins will again become collectibles and will outpace the intrinsic value of the metal content.
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November 26th, 2006 at 8:33 am
I thought it was 6 months for desktops as well at Costco. Last time I was at the return desk (9 months ago), they mentioned that high-end TVs will probably follow suit. I’m not sure if it has by now.
I’m not so sure that people are abusing the return policy as much as the nature of the items. They depreciate rapidly as new high-end products take their place.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I had a lot of good luck with precious metals as well this year. Some of the gold coins I bought were finally paying off after holding them for over twenty years.
http://1sttimeinvestor.blogspot.com
/2006/10/selling-precious-metals.html