Financial & Travel Musings

If you’ve had a reasonable summer season chances are that it’s time to get the pre-winter maintenance tasks done before putting all the equipment away ’til the next season.

The physical things are easy enough to identify and though they’re a bit of a pain to do they need doing before everything is put away or you’ll just have a whole heap of trouble next time you try to use the stuff. Where it’s less obvious is for the intangible things like motorhome insurance which is something that’s very easily forgotten about but, if anything, even more important than getting the lawnmower cleaned.

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It’s been a long time coming but at least now we are starting to see some of the exit signs to this recession.

Availability of jobs seems to be going up at a time of year when they’d normally be dropping off. Not in every job category just yet but the rise in availability of IT jobs is welcome as that generally comes ahead of increases in jobs in other categories.

Most noticeable for most people is the rise in the number of “sold” signs on houses. That’s a sign that the banks are easing up the mortgage requirements but may be a little misleading as it can seem to go backwards once the current crop of approved mortgages goes through.

Still, overall it’s nice to see that some of the early exit signs are now visible.

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When you’ve a sequence of events such as we’ve had over the last couple of years I’m sure that the thoughts of many people will have turned towards thoughts of preparations in case even more goes wrong.

That’s why the price of gold has been sailing rather high of course. However, just as these days you wouldn’t want to have all your money in one bank so too you shouldn’t have it all in one class of assets either. Thus people consider things like silver but that’s really not all that different in qualities to gold itself.

Much better to look at a store of value that’s quite different and that’s where diamonds come in. They’re radically different in that they’ve not got the industrial value that gold has in the sense that they’re not used as components in quite so many products. Rather they’re generally seen in limited industrial markets (low quality gems go there naturally) though in practical terms it’s the precious stones market that’s most significant.

One wonders what next can happen? We’ve had the economy tanking, the bankrupt banks, swine flu and a volcano. Perhaps it’s time for a major solar flare to really mess us up?

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