President Obama and gold

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At Kamaaina Loan, we are always interested in gold —

buying it, selling it, lending money on it. But not in

 predicting where the price is going.

Not everybody is so cautious. Consider this quote from

the financial advice service Seeking Alpha:

the reality is that President Obama is good for precious metal prices.

We’re not saying he is or he isn’t, but that’s short

and easy to remember. Remember that gold

was around $1720 an ounce on Election Day, but

it had varied by $75 up and down over the past

 30 days. It’s about $1729 as this is posted.

Let’s see where it goes from here. Meanwhile,

if you need cash, we have it and will exchange

 it for gold at the going rate.

Read the whole article at: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1003041-2012-election-president-obama-and-precious-metals

Is this the future of gold prices?

Pawn 101: Check under the hood

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Here’s a story that every pawn shop operator can give

personal testimony about.

A man brought us a book to see what it was worth.

It was volume 2 of a 2-volume edition of one of

Charles Darwin’s books. Ordinarily, volume 2 is

worth more than volume 1, because 2’s tend to get lost

more often. In this case, however, and on Maui, the

book was virtually worthless.

That’s because a complete set, in excellent condition,

can be had on the Internet for about $50. Given

shipping costs from Maui, and considering how

unlikely it would be to find a volume 1 here; and that

it’s a heavy book, it would cost more to marry volume 2

 up with a volume 1 on the Mainland than it’s worth.

However, while the owner was talking about where he

got the book, our assistant was flipping pages. “It’s

worth at least $20,” he told the owner.

Because someone had stuck a $20 Silver Certificate

between the pages.

At last August’s pawnbrokers’ convention, a Mainland

broker told about how a good customer whose husband

had died brought him a fancy hunting knife, hoping

she could get $300 to pay bills.

“I looked under the cotton in the knife box and there

were four one-hundred dollar bills.”

 

Subdividing your pawn loan

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The other day, a customer came in with a problem that could have easily been avoided with a little forethought.

She had four pawn loans outstanding, each one a mixture of gold jewelry (chains, earrings, rings etc.). Each loan was for over a thousand dollar. That made her a big customer, since the average pawn loan – both at Kamaaina Loan and nationwide – is under $100. (Sometimes way under. While the woman was working out her problem, a man came in and took out a pawn loan for $3.)

Her loans were not only a miscellany of objects. She had mixed items of sentimental value – “things I treasure,” she described them – with common jewelry of no special significance.

As sometimes happens, the customer did not have enough money to redeem all her pawns, or even to redeem one and extend the other three (which would have required less money now). She was faced with losing at least one bag of jewelry.

She could have stood that, she said, if she could have let the common stuff go and kept the treasures. Her problem was, the treasures were mixed in with the ordinary.

If she had had some extra cash, a resolution would have been simple: She could have redeemed one, taken out the treasure, then pawned the rest back for cash to repeat the sequence with the next.

She wanted to go into each bag and pull out the treasures, compensating us for that value. Unfortunately, the pawn contract doesn’t allow that.

It has to be closed out and returned to the customer, who can then re-pawn if she wants.

The simple precaution, if you are presenting both treasures and common goods, is to have the treasures written up as separate pawns. Then, if your expectations of being able to redeem don’t quite pan out, you can redeem the treasures and let the rest go.

A campaign high point

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Every campaign deserves a memorable hula, and kumu hula Patrick Makuakane delivers with the “Birth Certificate Hula.” If you follow the link, you’ll hear him say he was born at Kapiolani maternity just a couple days apart from Barack Obama.

The line “drunk in a taxi” is good.

Performance before enthusiastic audience here: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/288532_Birth_Certificate_Hula_-_Na_Le

Patrick Makuakane

Photo by Kathleen Bender

A sordid crime

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From India, a story about pawn customers murdering a 14-year-old assistant in a pawn shop: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/2-arrested-for-murder-of-boy-in-pawn-shop/articleshow/17012776.cms

As usual, the complete records that pawn shops everywhere keep were a big help to the police in fingering the suspects. Every item in a pawn shop has a ticket that says who it came from, where he lives etc.

There are a few cultural differences between th4 pawn shop in Chennai and any American pawn shop.

For one, it would be unusual to find a young teenager left alone in a pawn shop. Here, you have to be 18 to  be a customer or to work in a pawn shop.

For another, the robbers got away with 6 pounds of gold. Few, if any, American pawn shops keep that amount of gold on hand. For  both safety and financial reasons, they ship out their gold regularly to refiners.

It doesn’t pay to keep gold lying around when you can so easily — and instantly — get a refiner to transfer cash into your account.

But India is by far the world’s biggest A shop in Chennaiimporter of gold. Indians have a strong tendency to keep their wealth in gold, rather than in a mutual fund; so Indian pawn shops probably move a lot more gold in a day than American shops do.

The word “lakh” in the story means 100,000 and is commonly used to count large numbers of rupees. So the robbers got about $1,900 worth of rupees, a tiny amount compared with the $350,000 worth of gold they carried off.

Chennai, by the way, is a huge city, with a population about equal to that of Manhattan.

 

 

We don’t take collars any more

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Pawn shops will consider a loan on anything of value (unless, as we say, it eats), but fashions have pushed some items out of our universe.

For example, in 1838 Manhattan pawnbroker was happy to make a loan on 8 collars. He lent 37 1/2 cents.

Kamaaina Loan doesn’t make loans in fractions of a cent any more, or even fractions of a dollar,  but in 1838 37 1/2 was close to a day’s pay for some laborers.

Writing in Bloomberg News, pawn historian Wendy Woloson listed the loans made on a typical day, Aug. 31, in Simpson’s shop.

The full list is available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-09/a-brief-history-of-the-american-pawn-shop-echoes.html

Today, we’d take the accordian, the watch (although the “silver watch with broken hands” would be a close call), the broach, the saw (usually a power saw these days), the gold watch and chain and the silver medal.

It would have to  be a special table cloth these days at get our assent.As in 1838, most pawns are for small amounts, and most pawns are for jewelry or household items. But these days household items are more like to be TVs and video games than shawls and trousers.

The goods change over the generations but the business is mostly what it was long ago. As Woloson says,

Yesterday’s music box is today’s DVD player.

 

Dumb criminals

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From Florida, a story about a burglar who thought he’d fence the sterling silver he’d robbed at a pawn shop.

It didn’t faze him that the pawnbroker demanded that he produce a driver’s license and give a thumb print. (The same procedure is required by law in Hawaii and followed rigorously at Kamaaina Loan.)

Perhaps he thought, they’ll never connect the dots. Little did he know.

All the local detectives had to do — once the victim had reported the loss and provided some identifying information (in this case, a “D” monogram on the silver flatware) — was look in Pawn FINDER for a record of a pawnshop acquisition of a set of flatware with a D monogram.

A simple collar. http://http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49519029/ns/local_news-fort_myers_fl/t/thief-arrested-pawning-silverware/

There are a number of electronic pawn reports in use around the country. Kamaaina Loan has one of the oldest — two actually, one in a secure server for access by Maui law enforcement, pawnreport.com, which is similar to Pawn FINDER; and another, public free service for victims, mypawnreport.com, where victims of theft crimes can post (after filing a police report) information about what was lost.

It’s one thing for a burglar to leave a fingerprint for police to find at the scene. It’s a higher level of stupidity to give up a fingerprint on purpose when fencing the swag. But there are some really stupid criminals out there.

 

Are you too slow to vote?

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Frank Tanabe votes againAt the very least, you should vote because that other guy who’s for all the wrong things is voting this time, and you’ve got to cancel him out.

A more civics-class-positive view of voting is this story from Honolulu that’s catching the world’s attention (or, at least, that part of the world that uses the Internet):

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/175248241.html?id=175248241

Frank Tanabe, 93 and sick, is voting.

Things you’d rather do on Lanai

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Wrecked yacht from Inside Bay Area

Wrecked yacht from Inside Bay Area

Get dumped in the ocean when your $8-million America’s Cup sailboat crashes.

However, it did happen in San Francisco Bay. Brrrr.

Well, that’s another reason Lanai island owner Larry Ellison won’t be having his Oracle yacht team practicing off Lanai. No boat.

This isn’t the first time one of Ellison’s boats has crashed. In 2011, it happened off San Diego.

Bloomberg News has video of what $8 million worth of highest-tech sailboat looks like after it stumbles:

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-8m-oracle-yacht-meets-disaster-again-near-san-fran-vKOYYntaQAiI9qvexax08Q.html

Boat captain Jimmy Spithill said, ” There’s no question this is a setback.”

D’ja think?