30+% markups on gold and all kinds of scams risk spooking investors.
Gold bugs like to think they have all their bases covered. The price of the precious metal can only go up whether the economy is facing inflation or deflation, or so they claim.
Lilli Day | Photodisc | Getty Images
But beyond the lack of evidence for the metal's value thriving in either scenario, gold investors now face a situation that even they can't put a positive spin on. Major gold vendors like Goldline are coming under rapidly rising scrutiny for steering customers into coins with markups of 35 percent.
Salespeople imply that investors could exploit a loophole for antique coins to avoid a government confiscation of gold that supposedly took place during the Great Depression. But investors who try to sell the coins see a sharp drop as the market value tends to be less the huge profits pocketed by the vendor.
Fear-Mongering and Conflicts of Interest
Fear-mongering by those who, like Fox News host Glenn Beck, have lucrative deals with gold vendors has been causing angst about conflicts of interest for months. But reports of customers getting put into investments that lose a third of their value upon purchase are causing a new sense of alarm.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38487460
Gold bugs like to think they have all their bases covered. The price of the precious metal can only go up whether the economy is facing inflation or deflation, or so they claim.
Lilli Day | Photodisc | Getty Images
But beyond the lack of evidence for the metal's value thriving in either scenario, gold investors now face a situation that even they can't put a positive spin on. Major gold vendors like Goldline are coming under rapidly rising scrutiny for steering customers into coins with markups of 35 percent.
Salespeople imply that investors could exploit a loophole for antique coins to avoid a government confiscation of gold that supposedly took place during the Great Depression. But investors who try to sell the coins see a sharp drop as the market value tends to be less the huge profits pocketed by the vendor.
Fear-Mongering and Conflicts of Interest
Fear-mongering by those who, like Fox News host Glenn Beck, have lucrative deals with gold vendors has been causing angst about conflicts of interest for months. But reports of customers getting put into investments that lose a third of their value upon purchase are causing a new sense of alarm.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38487460
