Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

One of my biggest frustrations is how much of the world doesn’t seem to realize the largest fraud that is going on right in front of its face:

 

Diamonds

Photo by Swamibu

The Diamond Cartel run by De Beers.

It is a house of cards that De Beers has masterfully built in order to make people believe, dare I say worship, the idea that diamonds are unique, rare, and intrinsically valuable when it is anything but. Diamonds can be found all over the world, from Australia to Germany and especially in Africa. Merchants used to be able to dig them up by the ton, and in some places they still do. However, the diamond industry knew that the price of diamonds would plummet if the public could get a hold of them, so they locked away any excess and took a stranglehold on the number of diamonds available to people.

I found a great article at TheAtlantic that details the entire diamond industry and the monopoly that De Beers has had over any diamonds that show up in the market. These sections from the article shown below completely summarize how the De Beers cartel was formed and their subsequent brainwashing of the masses into believing that diamonds are rare and expensive:

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity.

Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public’s hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world’s mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa.

De Beers proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depression. Indeed, the cartel seemed so superbly in control of prices — and unassailable — that, in the late 1970s, even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession.

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever — “forever” in the sense that they should never be resold.

De Beers needed a slogan for diamonds that expressed both the theme of romance and legitimacy. An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption “A Diamond Is Forever,” which was scrawled on the bottom of a picture of two young lovers on a honeymoon. Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds. Within a year, “A Diamond Is Forever” became the official motto of De Beers.

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. “Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age,” it said. “To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone.” The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would “defer the purchase” rather than forgo it.

By 1979, N. W. Ayer had helped De Beers expand its sales of diamonds in the United States to more than $2.1 billion, at the wholesale level, compared with a mere $23 million in 1939. In forty years, the value of its sales had increased nearly a hundredfold. The expenditure on advertisements, which began at a level of only $200,000 a year and gradually increased to $10 million, seemed a brilliant investment.

This article also goes into the illusion of price stability for diamonds and how very difficult it is to ever turn a profit on reselling the diamonds you buy from diamond dealers, hence the title of the article:

Selling individual diamonds at a profit, even those held over long periods of time, can be surprisingly difficult. For example, in 1970, the London-based consumer magazine Money Which? decided to test diamonds as a decade long investment. It bought two gem-quality diamonds, weighing approximately one-half carat apiece, from one of London’s most reputable diamond dealers, for £400 (then worth about a thousand dollars). For nearly nine years, it kept these two diamonds sealed in an envelope in its vault. During this same period, Great Britain experienced inflation that ran as high as 25 percent a year. For the diamonds to have kept pace with inflation, they would have had to increase in value at least 300 percent, making them worth some £400 pounds by 1978. But when the magazine’s editor, Dave Watts,tried to sell the diamonds in 1978, he found that neither jewelry stores nor wholesale dealers in London’s Hatton Garden district would pay anywhere near that price for the diamonds. Most of the stores refused to pay any cash for them; the highest bid Watts received was £500, which amounted to a profit of only £100 in over eight years, or less than 3 percent at a compound rate of interest. If the bid were calculated in 1970 pounds, it would amount to only £167. Dave Watts summed up the magazine’s experiment by saying, “As an 8-year investment the diamonds that we bought have proved to be very poor.” The problem was that the buyer, not the seller, determined the price.

The magazine conducted another experiment to determine the extent to which larger diamonds appreciate in value over a one-year period. In 1970, it bought a 1.42 carat diamond for £745. In 1971, the highest offer it received for the same gem was £568. Rather than sell it at such an enormous loss, Watts decided to extend the experiment until 1974, when he again made the round of the jewelers in Hatton Garden to have it appraised. During this tour of the diamond district, Watts found that the diamond had mysteriously shrunk in weight to 1.04 carats. One of the jewelers had apparently switched diamonds during the appraisal. In that same year, Watts, undaunted, bought another diamond, this one 1.4 carats, from a reputable London dealer. He paid £2,595. A week later, he decided to sell it. The maximum offer he received was £1,000.

Selling diamonds can also be an extraordinarily frustrating experience for private individuals. In 1978, for example, a wealthy woman in New York City decided to sell back a diamond ring she had bought from Tiffany two years earlier for $100,000 and use the proceeds toward a necklace of matched pearls that she fancied. She had read about the “diamond boom” in news magazines and hoped that she might make a profit on the diamond. Instead, the sales executive explained, with what she said seemed to be a touch of embarrassment, that Tiffany had “a strict policy against repurchasing diamonds.” He assured her, however, that the diamond was extremely valuable, and suggested another Fifth Avenue jewelry store. The woman went from one leading jeweler to another, attempting to sell her diamond. One store offered to swap it for another jewel, and two other jewelers offered to accept the diamond “on consignment” and pay her a percentage of what they sold it for, but none of the half-dozen jewelers she visited offered her cash for her $100,000 diamond. She finally gave up and kept the diamond.

The appraisers at Empire Diamonds examine thousands of diamonds a month but rarely turn up a diamond of extraordinary quality. Almost all the diamonds they find are slightly flawed, off-color, commercial-grade diamonds. The chief appraiser says, “When most of these diamonds were purchased, American women were concerned with the size of the diamond, not its intrinsic quality.” He points out that the setting frequently conceals flaws, and adds, “The sort of flawless, investment-grade diamond one reads about is almost never found in jewelry.”

To make a profit, investors must at some time find buyers who are willing to pay more for their diamonds than they did. Here, however, investors face the same problem as those attempting to sell their jewelry: there is no unified market in which to sell diamonds. Although dealers will quote the prices at which they are willing to sell investment-grade diamonds, they seldom give a set price at which they are willing to buy diamonds of the same grade. In 1977, for example, Jewelers’ Circular Keystone polled a large number of retail dealers and found a difference of over 100 percent in offers for the same quality of investment-grade diamonds. Moreover, even though most investors buy their diamonds at or near retail price, they are forced to sell at wholesale prices. As Forbes magazine pointed out, in 1977, “Average investors, unfortunately, have little access to the wholesale market. Ask a jeweler to buy back a stone, and he’ll often begin by quoting a price 30% or more below wholesale.” Since the difference between wholesale and retail is usually at least 100 percent in investment diamonds, any gain from the appreciation of the diamonds will probably be lost in selling them.

“There’s going to come a day when all those doctors, lawyers, and other fools who bought diamonds over the phone take them out of their strongboxes, or wherever, and try to sell them,” one dealer predicted last year. Another gave a gloomy picture of what would happen if this accumulation of diamonds were suddenly sold by speculators. “Investment diamonds are bought for $30,000 a carat, not because any woman wants to wear them on her finger but because the investor believes they will be worth $50,000 a carat. He may borrow heavily to leverage his investment. When the price begins to decline, everyone will try to sell their diamonds at once. In the end, of course, there will be no buyers for diamonds at $30,000 a carat or even $15,000. At this point, there will be a stampede to sell investment diamonds, and the newspapers will begin writing stories about the great diamond crash. Investment diamonds constitute, of course, only a small fraction of the diamonds held by the public, but when women begin reading about a diamond crash, they will take their diamonds to retail jewelers to be appraised and find out that they are worth less than they paid for them. At that point, people will realize that diamonds are not forever, and jewelers will be flooded with customers trying to sell, not buy, diamonds. That will be the end of the diamond business.”

Truth be told, everyone around me believes that diamonds are valuable yet I have never met one person that has actually sold a diamond before. After reading that article, I cannot understand why anyone would still logically fall into the trap of buying diamonds. Maybe it isn’t logical and is just all psychological. I guess De Beers did their job too well. After all, diamonds are forever, until they get “shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash” that is.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!

If You Suddenly Need Cash

No Cash No Problem, Caution

Photo by futureshape

A recent article in the Money Magazine listed 17 (from best to worst) ways to raise cash. Here is their list:

  1. Tap your emergency fund - Best way cause that’s what it’s for. But if you do use it, be sure to save it back up as soon as possible.
  2. Sell some investments - They mean the non-retirement investments. Once you sell them, you can lock in the gains and/or write-off the losses. Make sure you sell the ones that are over one year because then you only get hit with 15% capital gains instead of owing ordinary income tax. If you are selling losses, you can write-off $3,000/year and any excess can be carried into subsequent years.
  3. Ask the folks for a gift - You won’t get taxed for any gifts and your parents are allowed to give you gifts up $24,000/year (or $12,000/year if just a single parent). Any more than that they will get hit with a gift tax.
  4. Bust into a CD early - Good for getting cash immediately; however, you’ll get hit with early-withdrawal penalty that can range from three months interest for CDs less than 18 months to six months interest for CDs greater than two years. The good thing is you get to deduct the penalty on the tax return.
  5. Cash in your whole life insurance policy - Actually a good idea cause whole life insurance policies have one of the worst interest rates so you weren’t going to make very much from it anyways. Once you sell it, you can then buy a much cheaper term life insurance policy and save the difference in cost. The only problem is you won’t be able to get any cash out of your whole life policy unless you’ve paid premiums on the policy for more than two years. And even after that, you won’t be able to get much money out of the whole life policy unless you’ve had it for five or more years. Note that you will owe regular income tax on any gains from cashing out the policy.
  6. Borrow from family or friends - Besides how difficult this will make your relationship with your family and/or friends, the IRS rules also require you to pay “reasonable” interest on loans above $10,000 (charge no less than 1% below what local banks charge for personal loans). Make sure to get the entire loan down in writing (the amount borrowed, interest rate, and repayment terms), otherwise expect your relationship to implode as it always does when you mix business with pleasure. I’ll be seeing you in family court soon.
  7. Take out a home equity line of credit - Also known as a HELOC and these can be hard to get. In order to qualify for one, you generally need a credit score of 680 or better and have at least 20% equity in your house. Fortunately, a HELOC has many positives which justify their difficulty in obtaining one: interest rates average around 5.7%; interest on loans less than $100,000 is tax deductible; and they have low up-front fees.
  8. Do a cash-out mortgage refinancing - Fortunately these are easier to get than a HELOC. Unfortunately, they have high taxes and fees, which is generally about 3% on your entire mortgage (not just the cash-out amount). Refis usually allow you to take out up to 90% of house value, but if you borrow more than 80% you will need to pay a PMI (private mortgage insurance).
  9. Borrow from your 401(k) or 403(b) plan - The good thing is you can borrow at a low rate from yourself, so that when you pay it back the interest gets paid back to yourself too. But usually this option is not as flexible as some of the others, many retirement plans only let you borrow under certain conditions such as for a first home purchase and medical expenses. In addition, if you do borrow money, you need to start paying it back right away. Also, you can’t borrow as much as some of the other options because you are limited to borrowing 50% of the vested amount. The worst thing about doing this is definitely the loss of potential investment gains.
  10. Borrow against other investment accounts - This is usually called a margin loan, in which you borrow against your investments. The interest rates are generally 6% to 7% if you have at least $50,000 of investments. For this option you mainly need to watch out if you trigger a forced sale due to falling assets values.
  11. Borrow from strangers - You might be able to get a better rate than a bank loan if you borrow from lending websites such as Prosper.com, LendingClub.com, and Zopa.com. The average rate for borrowers with a score higher than 720 is 9.4%. However, if you have a lower credit score then the accepted interest rate increases as well. For example, if your score is between 600 and 719, you would have paid an average of 16.5% recently; below 600, 35%! In addition, the lending sites charge fees from 0.5% to 2% and cap the amount borrowed to $25,000.
  12. Tap your IRA - Again, this option causes you to lose out in potential investment gains. The good thing is if you are younger than 59.5 and have had the IRA for more than five years, you might be able to take a penalty-free withdrawal for certain expenses (home and medical expenses). In addition, there’s another provision in the IRS that allows you to withdraw money from an IRA so long as you roll it over into a new IRA or redeposit it in the same account within 60 days. That provision only allows you to use the 60 day window once a year though. However, if you take advantage of that provision and you don’t pay it back within 60 days, you will get hit with both taxes and the 10% penalty for withdrawing before you are 59.5 years old.
  13. Do a reverse mortgage - You can only do this if you are over 62 years old. It is pretty bad though because the amount of equity you are allowed to pull out and use is far less than a traditional mortgage. Adding insult to injury, the younger you are, the less equity you can take out because it will take longer for the loan to be paid back. Also, they usually carry high fees, about three times greater than a traditional mortgage.
  14. Sell some hard assets - Too bad they aren’t talking about a yard sale, which is always a good way to both make money and clear junk out of your house. Instead, they are talking about high valued hard assets such as antiques, art, jewelry, and furniture. You can always use an auctioneer to try and sell some of those hard assets. If you decide to do so, watch out for the hefty auctioneer fees that can range from 10% to 20% on sales greater than $10,000. And if you do make a sale, you can also get hit with a large collectible tax of 28% on any gains.
  15. Take a cash advance on your credit card - Definitely a bad idea because the interest rates can easily shoot up from 4% to 30% within a couple of months.
  16. Liquidate your 401(k) or 403(b) account - The recent 401(k) debit cards sure make this easy to do. Be cautious about doing this if you are younger than 59.5 years old because you will get hit with both ordinary income tax and the 10% penalty. In addition, there might be state taxes on top of that, pushing up the tax to 50% on any amount you take out. And this is not including the effects of the loss of potential investment gains.
  17. Go to a payday lender - There are absolutely no benefits in doing this. Annualized interest rates can range from an incredible 200% to 500%!! Don’t do this no matter how desperate you are because there are always other options, like the ones shown above.
Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!
Filed under: Cashflow | 10 Comments

How Piracy Has Changed The Face Of Capitalism

Pirated WindowsXP

Photo by jurvetson

From Dictionary.com:

Piracy [pahy-ruh-see] is defined as the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.

Capitalism [kap-i-tl-iz-uhm] is defined as an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.

So what do you get when you have anonymous piracy thrown into orthodox capitalism?

Chaos.

Unassuming piracy has wreaked havoc upon our conventional model of capitalism. The alphabet soup of agencies from the MPAA to the RIAA have been cast into a state of flux ever since various file-sharing technologies have emerged as the new badasses of the neighborhood. The most frightening one of all, BitTorrent (also more ubiquitous known as P2P) has bred a whole new generation of pirates. And so far? There is no end in sight. Whenever they are able to catch ten pirates, a hundred more emerges. They are fighting a losing battle. This new age of file-sharing is like the Greek monster Hydra where when you cut off one head, two more sprout in its place. Only on steroids. You can see why the MPAA and RIAA are shaking in their figurative boots. And the only Hercules available would be to either (1) turn off the Internet or (2) implement pervasive Big Brother type web surveillance. Either one of the options would cause widespread uprisings and Anarchy.

Yet at the same time, I do realize that piracy poses a serious threat to those agencies that are trying to enforce copyright rules. If copyright rules cannot be upheld and anything can be copied, shared, and transferred with no impediment then why would producers, directors, musicians, and artists continue to work? After all, everything they have made can be possessed with a click of the mouse. If we want people to continue to create new products then there must be an incentive to do so. That is the foundation of capitalism, people work because they believe they will be personally compensated for it. With the pressure of piracy, which shares the work of the individual to the cooperative at large with no compensation to the individual, capitalism will crumble.

Since there is no clear answer to this problem in the foreseeable future, one has to ask why. Why has piracy become so prevalent so quickly? Why has the younger generation embraced every new technology that propagates illegal distribution of files? Recently a game designer and programmer named Cliff Harris asked the exact same question in a blog post, calling for pirates all over the interweb to explain why they pirate. This is the first time I have seen a programmer candidly ask for a reason and as a result, Cliff’s post created a furor of discussion. Personally I think the answer to this question is simple: Piracy is free and easy. Although the MPAA and RIAA want you to believe otherwise, the chances of getting caught are close to nil. And the cover of anonymity generally brings out the worst in people. The same people that will pirate most likely would not steal in a typical store. Truthfully, I don’t think it is surprising that our culture has embraced piracy given the low chance of being caught and the advantages of doing it. It is like speeding, everyone does it even though it is against the law. People just weigh the advantages of speeding and the likelihood of being pulled over and decide it is worth the risk.

What do you think are the reasons that people pirate and how do you think it will affect our culture of capitalism?

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!
Filed under: Capitalism | 3 Comments

TSP versus Vanguard, Which is a Better Choice?

I am currently a Federal employee and they provide a 401k plan called the TSP. Now I will definitely contribute into the TSP up to the federal matching rate, which is up to 5%. But my conundrum is whether it is financially savvy to increase my contribution (beyond the matching point) into the TSP or is it better to invest into Vanguard. Right now I am invested in both.

There’s many people that have never heard of a TSP, Thrift Savings Plan. It is a retirement savings plan for people that do/used to work for the Federal Government or the uniformed services. It is a defined contribution plan that is basically the same as any other 401k plan. But why am I comparing TSP to Vanguard? It’s because Vanguard has basically the lowest expense ratios for mutual funds. There’s no point to compare unless it’s to the best.

Now if you read any book about mutual fund investing you’ll know the best and simplest investment strategy is index investing because those have minimum expense ratios. So to compare apples to apples I dug through the TSP and Vanguard sites to chart their funds and compare their expense ratios.

TSP Fund TSP XP Ratio Vanguard Fund Vanguard XP Ratio
G Fund 0.015% No Equivalent Fund N/A
F Fund 0.015% Total Bond Market Index (VBMFX) 0.19%
C Fund 0.015% S&P 500 Index (VFINX) 0.15%
S Fund 0.015% Extended Market Index (VEXMX) 0.24%
I Fund 0.015% Developed Markets Index (VDMIX) 0.22%

Looking at these comparison you can see that TSP expense ratios are dirt cheap compared to Vanguard. In addition to that, the G Fund that TSP offers has no risk but still gives you returns, kind of like a free lunch; however, there is no equivalent fund in the Vanguard.

But another question is whether these TSP funds are comparable to the Vanguard funds. Are they representative of each other? Do they invest in basically the same assets? To compare that I pulled up the yearly returns between the two funds and found this:

Year F Fund VBMFX C Fund VFINX S Fund VEXMX I Fund VDMIX
1999 -0.85 -0.8 20.95 21.1 35.49 - 26.72 -
2000 11.67 11.4 -9.14 -9.1 -15.77 -
-14.17 -
2001 8.61 8.4 -11.94 -12.0 -9.04 -9.2 -21.94 -22.0
2002 10.27 8.3 -22.05 -22.2 -18.14 -18.1 -15.98 -15.7
2003 4.11 4.0 28.53 28.5 42.92 43.4 37.94 38.6
2004 4.30 4.2 10.82 10.7 18.03 18.7 20.00 20.3
2005 2.40 2.4 4.96 4.8 10.45 10.3 13.63 13.3
2006 4.40 4.3 15.79 15.6 15.30 14.3 26.32 26.2
2007 7.09 6.9 5.54 5.4 5.49 4.3 11.43 11.0

Looking at the above chart it shows that they are similar, with only a few differences each year. So in the long run, they are comparable to each other.

So overall, when you are saving for retirement, you should come out on top when investing into a TSP since they have the same returns as Vanguard but are much cheaper to own. Thus, it is better to put more money into the TSP than Vanguard. Of course, if you’re not a federal employee then you’re outta luck!

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!

The Importance of Taking Responsibility

In light of all the doom and gloom that has recently cloaked society like a thick fog, I think so many of us have forgotten the importance of taking responsibility.

You are responsible to yourself and what happens in your life. You are responsible for your happiness and success. Nobody else can force you to be happy or successful unless you want to be those things. So it is up to you to take charge and take responsibility if you are not happy or successful. I know, some people might say it’s not my fault that certain things have happened in my life. I can understand that, there are some things that are out of your control, but then there is so much more that is within your control. No one has a choice in the hand they are dealt in life, but they do have control of how they decide to play those cards.

Decide today if you want to greet every person you meet with a smile on your face or a frown for all to see. If you smile, the whole world smiles with you. But if you frown, you frown alone. Besides, it’s hard to stay upset when you keep smiling. Try that sometimes, its true.

Instead of blaming everything and everybody else for your current circumstances, why don’t you try to take a hold of it and change it. From all my interactions with people the one thing I am sure of is that people are very adaptable to their environments. If they really wanted to change badly enough, they will be able to do it. If they really want to accomplish something enough, they will reach their goals. And if you shoot for the stars, you just might hit the moon.

Acknowledge the fact that only you can live your life and so you make the final decisions that affect your life. You can always change the final outcome. Isn’t it incredible to think that where and who we are right now is a result of all the different choices we have made so far in life? So if you want to be somewhere else in life, you need to start making the changes right now.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

- Jim Rohn

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • StumbleUpon
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!
Filed under: Life | No Comments