Hard Assets In An Age Of Negative Interest Rates

In a word, the hard asset vision is about building wealth outside the stock market. It refers to three main strategies overall: 

1) land ownership and/or farmland, forestry and agriculture

2) gold, other precious metals, and certain base-metal commodities, and

3) The (Old Masters/Classic Modern) art market.

Where this last is concerned, we mean art as investment and not art-as-commerce, such as that which contaminates today’s insipid and overpriced world of ‘Balloon-Dog’ bad art. The auction world of Rembrandt and Picasso; of El Greco and Gerhardt Richter has been on a tear, is smashing records, and cannot be ignored as an excellent safe-haven vehicle, as outstanding works of art traditionally always have been.

To begin with, physical gold and precious metals remain an investment enigma despite being market-leading performers for the past seventeen years. Gold is a must-have portfolio asset amid the aggressive debt levels and monetary debasement that have so unhinged the market. Silver, for its part, in addition to its prestige status, also has innumerable industrial applications and throughout the precious-metal bull market since 2000.

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