Foreign Perspectives

Ordinarily, construction jobs would be amongst those doing fairly well in a recession as whilst people may not be moving house quite so often, they will tend to improve and extend what they already have. However, as ever, this time it’s different.

Those house improvements aren’t happening because people don’t have the cash to do it. Cash is exactly what they need too as the builders can’t get credit from their suppliers so the whole system has made a sudden lurch from credit based to cash based which is painful for everyone.

Other signs up improvement would be in the computer field as websites and whatnot would tend to need created as the economy improves. That too seems a little flakey this time around.

Of course, all this assumes that the economy will experience an upturn and, no doubt, it will. The big question is: when?

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If you’d asked that question a year ago I’d have said that it’s too high now but it’s gone up around 30% since then. Five years ago and I’d have said the same but it’s more than doubled since then.

Of course, as with all investments, there is no truly right time to invest or at least not one that you’ll know about in advance. That said, there’s never a wrong time to begin a Gold investment programme if you approach it as an investment programme rather than a one time hit as some people do. The key thing is to stagger your investments just as you would in any other field of investment. That staggering has been something that’s historically been quite difficult to do in that in years gone by the investment unit tended to be a gold bar which obviously requires a serious commitment. However, all that has changed in recent years with the advent of smaller bars, safe storage facilities and wider availability of bullion coins. Thus you can almost treat it as any other phased investment these days, albeit with the smallest unit seemingly endlessly increasing in value, at least for now.

One thing to watch is that you don’t want to commit too high a chunk of your wealth to gold just as you shouldn’t commit too high a percentage to any asset class. Although gold prices have been on an upward path for quite some time now, that doesn’t mean that they’ll continue on that path forever. Sooner or later the prices will come down but by averaging your purchases over an extended period you should be in a good position to take advantage of the overall rise when that fall does arrive.

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Whilst we all think that we’d like to live in interesting times, of course such times are interesting because they are filled with the unexpected which is usually a sign of trouble.

Thus over the last couple of years we’ve had by far the most interesting time in global economics for many decades. That interest came in the form of banks and economies around the world collapsing and with the corresponding knock-on effect on the real world in terms of jobs lost, businesses closing, houses being repossessed and taxes rising. And it’s not over yet.

Throughout all that global bad news there have been untold numbers of individuals receiving their own bad news ranging from job losses through to families finding themselves out on the street due to reasons outside their control.

I’m sure that many people would prefer to opt for living in really boring times these days.

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