Moolah

[zankubongo]

Source

If you bought $1000 of stock a year ago, you would now have:

$91.28 if you bought Washington Mutual
$37.50 if you bought Neomagic
$21.29 if you bought Freddie Mac
$20.79 if you bought Fannie Mae

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the recycling REFUND... You would have $... 214.00 in cash.

So the best investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.
It's called the 401-Keg Plan.

If you'd bought $1,000 of gold (which costs $851/oz today), you would now have:

* $1,220 if you'd bought it 1 year ago ($695/oz)
* $2,340 if you'd bought it 5 years ago ($364/oz)
* $2,890 if you'd bought it 10 years ago ($294/oz)
* $1,940 if you'd bought it 20 years ago ($437/oz)
* $4,400 if you'd bought it 30 years ago ($193/oz)
* $22,000 if you'd bought it 40 years ago ($39/oz)

There's no reason you can't make money off of inflation.

edit: I calculated the effective "interest rates" that gold would have returned for these amounts and time periods:

* 1 year: 20%
* 5 years: 17%
* 10 years: 11%
* 20 years: 3.3%
* 30 years: 4.9%
* 40 years: 7.7%
In other words... GOOOOOOOOLD