Hi NOP-and may I reiterate how we love reading your posts! They are so beautifully evocative of how you found life in Brooklyn. I think Mr. B should start a column called “Growing Up Brooklyn so you and others could write about what it was like, growing up here. I, of course, would be automatically disqualified 🙂
With silver prices at these levels, the exchange has to maintain adequate collateral to account cover the risk of non performance. As you might know, the CME (now owns NYMEX) as all exchanges, mark to market daily commodities cleared on the exchanges. If you lose, you pay up daily. Similiarly you get to collect on gains daily. So for a “good faith” original margin payment, you can own 5,000 oz of silver. Now you have to pay 16,500 dollars a contract for that right and must maintain that in an account at all times, despite market movement. The exchanges use a kind of VAR (Value at Risk) calculation to determine basically a two day move in the value of the commodity to calculate the level of this collateral to cover an adverse move. This is based not only on outright price movement but volatility of the move as well. Silver moved in a 6 dollar range the other day. This is KILLER VOLATILITY. The exchange is responsible for maintaining an orderly marketplace and ensuring that there are no defaults. So yes, you have had a 138% move in the price of silver in 4 months. Grandmas are buying through futures AND ETFS.
Forget fundamental analysis of silver. It acting as a lower priced clone of gold. Sure silver has industrial uses. So does gold, so does platinum, so does palladium. These are being used now like gold, as hedge vehicles not only for equity portfolios but for the abysmal drop in the dollar.
Odd, finding oneself a topic on the OT. But thanks Montrose, Bxgrl and Biff for the nice words.
And Benson, you’re right, my Brooklyn experience wasn’t typical outside a network of people like my parents, largely “bohemian” (the term used at the time), who held onto Brooklyn and New York as long as they could.
While others left, they were able to live relatively cheaply and well in the brownstone houses and pre-war apartments that are so desirable now but were dismissed back then as old and decrepit, usually by people who were looking for the new, homogenous and “safe” and who were given the deep government subsidies to move to the suburbs. It took a certain quirkiness and independence to see quality in Brooklyn at the time, and a kind of willfulness to resist the mass ex-migration from town. The adults I knew were painters, writers, poets, playwrights and academics who were warm, gracious and funny and lived in big shabby places with terrific style. That generation’s gone now, which makes it amusing to see Brownstoners’ attempts to reconstitute its life-style at such highly-inflated prices.
I’ve written about Brooklyn’s underlying social tensions in other posts. These were always at the edges of my boyhood, and learning how to negotiate them was integral to my growing up. And as my brother says, growing up in Brooklyn when we did makes us much more relaxed about people’s differences than we might otherwise be.
And yes, when I’m in town I live in Manhattan, largely because my parents left me their co-op. (Who, in his right mind, would ever give up “free” New York real estate?)
But I loved Brooklyn then and I love Brooklyn now. (And if I’d inherited a place in my old borough, that’s where I’d be.)
ahem, some of us are still growing up in brooklyn
“Growing Up Brooklyn so you and others could write about what it was like, growing up here.”
That would be fun, I’d love to read that.
NOP, Did you say you graduated from college in the 70s?
Hi NOP-and may I reiterate how we love reading your posts! They are so beautifully evocative of how you found life in Brooklyn. I think Mr. B should start a column called “Growing Up Brooklyn so you and others could write about what it was like, growing up here. I, of course, would be automatically disqualified 🙂
I don’t trust them, I value my privacy.
But as someone I know who worked for Microsoft for many years told me…in the late 80s: “There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”
With silver prices at these levels, the exchange has to maintain adequate collateral to account cover the risk of non performance. As you might know, the CME (now owns NYMEX) as all exchanges, mark to market daily commodities cleared on the exchanges. If you lose, you pay up daily. Similiarly you get to collect on gains daily. So for a “good faith” original margin payment, you can own 5,000 oz of silver. Now you have to pay 16,500 dollars a contract for that right and must maintain that in an account at all times, despite market movement. The exchanges use a kind of VAR (Value at Risk) calculation to determine basically a two day move in the value of the commodity to calculate the level of this collateral to cover an adverse move. This is based not only on outright price movement but volatility of the move as well. Silver moved in a 6 dollar range the other day. This is KILLER VOLATILITY. The exchange is responsible for maintaining an orderly marketplace and ensuring that there are no defaults. So yes, you have had a 138% move in the price of silver in 4 months. Grandmas are buying through futures AND ETFS.
Forget fundamental analysis of silver. It acting as a lower priced clone of gold. Sure silver has industrial uses. So does gold, so does platinum, so does palladium. These are being used now like gold, as hedge vehicles not only for equity portfolios but for the abysmal drop in the dollar.
Odd, finding oneself a topic on the OT. But thanks Montrose, Bxgrl and Biff for the nice words.
And Benson, you’re right, my Brooklyn experience wasn’t typical outside a network of people like my parents, largely “bohemian” (the term used at the time), who held onto Brooklyn and New York as long as they could.
While others left, they were able to live relatively cheaply and well in the brownstone houses and pre-war apartments that are so desirable now but were dismissed back then as old and decrepit, usually by people who were looking for the new, homogenous and “safe” and who were given the deep government subsidies to move to the suburbs. It took a certain quirkiness and independence to see quality in Brooklyn at the time, and a kind of willfulness to resist the mass ex-migration from town. The adults I knew were painters, writers, poets, playwrights and academics who were warm, gracious and funny and lived in big shabby places with terrific style. That generation’s gone now, which makes it amusing to see Brownstoners’ attempts to reconstitute its life-style at such highly-inflated prices.
I’ve written about Brooklyn’s underlying social tensions in other posts. These were always at the edges of my boyhood, and learning how to negotiate them was integral to my growing up. And as my brother says, growing up in Brooklyn when we did makes us much more relaxed about people’s differences than we might otherwise be.
And yes, when I’m in town I live in Manhattan, largely because my parents left me their co-op. (Who, in his right mind, would ever give up “free” New York real estate?)
But I loved Brooklyn then and I love Brooklyn now. (And if I’d inherited a place in my old borough, that’s where I’d be.)
I’m not normally paranoid (really, I’m not!) but this article has me wondering:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/05/scott-clelands-new-book-details-why-google-cant-be-trusted/1
“Get out your long-johns, it’s going down into the 40s tonight!”
Thank you for letting me know…I’m running down to turn the heat back on!