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In his most excellent book 'Last days of the Incas', Kim MacQuarrie, postulates that the 16th century conquest of Peru by the brutal Pizzaro brothers and their conquistador buddies was an exercise in retirement planning.
The gold the Spanish mercilessly extracted from the Incas enabled the Pizzaros et al - or those who survived the various internecine betrayals and Inca rebellions - to live out their later years in splendour, pursuing, at leisure, whatever the 16th century equivalents of golf and fishing were.
Five centuries later, gold-lust is still around - and that fundamentally useless metal is looking sexier than ever to some investors. Gold is edging up to US$1,000 an ounce with some touting that to soon double as either deflation or inflation scenarios play out - the precious metal can beat them both, according to this gold-lover's website. Exactly how gold performs this trick is a mixture of the physical - it's rare and very hard to destroy - and psychological, ie it has a value because enough people believe it has a value.
There are many mechanisms for investing in gold directly or otherwise - for example, at least two New Zealand fund managers, Socrates Fund Management and Diversified Investment Strategies put a lot of store in the metal's hedging characteristics.
Perhaps investing in gold is the sane thing to do in crazy times but economist Steven Landsburg in 'More sex is safe sex: the unconventional wisdom of economics' puts the metal madness in a wider perspective.
"Gold," Landsburg writes, "has almost no social value."
It also diverts attention away from more productive activities. As he points out in the book, almost 10 per cent of the US male population under 40 were lured away from useful work to the California gold fields in 1843 in pursuit of an early retirement.
The rising gold price - spurred on by demand from fearful investors - is also creating a modern version of a gold rush, according to this story in the January 09 edition of National Geographic magazine.
This fascinating article begins by tracking miner Juan Apaza as he digs for gold under a glacier high in the Peruvian Andes. Apaza, a descendant of the Incas, is paid at the end of each week with a sack of rocks from the mine rather than cash.
"Maybe today will be the big one," Apaza says in the story, holding up his bag of dirt. It's the kind of retirement strategy the Pizzaro brothers would approve of - as long as someone else was doing the digging.
David Chaplin