There you go with your sheeple again. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a sheep. But ideas have to emanate from somewhere. And we all tend to pursue the ones we think are good.
In this case, I think that on your own measure of market success to denote the correctness of an idea, Buffett is pretty much unassailable.
You still think that gold is the only form of value in an economy. I like Buffett's imagery on this topic:
"Over the past 15 years, both Internet stocks and houses have demonstrated the extraordinary excesses that can be created by combining an initially sensible thesis with well-publicized rising prices. In these bubbles, an army of originally skeptical investors succumbed to the "proof " delivered by the market, and the pool of buyers -- for a time -- expanded sufficiently to keep the bandwagon rolling. But bubbles blown large enough inevitably pop. And then the old proverb is confirmed once again: "What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end."
Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be about $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?"
By the way, I only just discovered that Warren is following my lead on gold. But I shall not charge him with his sheepiness towards my sagacity and gurutude.
For myself, I think gold is likely to do okay for a while longer, specially while the problems in Europe persist and the Chinese property bubble remains inflated. Whether the gold bubble pops or dissipates depends on the general state of fear and the quality of opportunities elsewhere in the marketplace.
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