Posts

Should you line up to buy silver?

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silver-coins

You might have to, according to this report from Numismatic News:

Rationing the supply of new 2014 silver American Eagle bullion coins might return if current extraordinary demand for them continues.

The real question is not whether you should wait in line but whether you should buy now. All we can say is, silver is priced much lower than it was two years ago. It has declined more rapidly than gold.

Taking the end of 2012 as a somewhat arbitrary point, silver is down by nearly half, while gold is down by less than a third. Still, either is only a bargain today if the price is not going to go much lower. Who knows?

Numismatic News attributes the latest boomlet in Silver Eagle sales to bargain-hunting spurred by low prices. The number of eagles sold in September was 4.1 million (or around $65-67 million, not a huge amount compared to what flows into mutual funds).

At our Maui pawn shop, we are agnostic about the price trend. We will sell if you want to buy, or buy if you want to sell, and take our chances on the market.

What we do promise is that we will beat any other offer on Maui. Shop around but see us last.silver-coins

#mauicoin #mauisilver #mauigold

What the heck is going on in the markets?

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sales

At Kamaaina Loan we often say — it’s not a lament, just a fact — that we are at the mercy of the world gold market. Buying and selling (or making loans against) gold is our bread-and-butter, and when the price falls as it has recently, it hurts.

Not just our bottom line, but it lowers the amount we can offer on pawn loans. So, such is life.

But most of the time, prices — not just gold but most prices — move in a comprehensible way. There are trends you think you can rely on at least for a week or so. Gold, for example, has been trending down for over a year. Less heralded, the world price of oil has been going down.

You wouldn’t notice from pump prices on Maui, but according to Bloomberg News, the price is almost low enough to make the famous Keystone Pipeline a non-starter. All that political furor and $90 a barrel oil could make the arguments moot.

At the current price of about $87 a barrel, cheap American crude undercuts many of the most aggressive oil projects under consideration by the oil majors. About $1.1 trillion of capital expenditures have been earmarked through 2025 for projects that require a market price of more than $95 a barrel, according to a May study by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank and environmental advocacy group.

At least the oil price drop is easily understood: production is way up and demand is stable or slightly falling.

But the securities markets seem to have lost their mind this week. Tuesday was the best day of the year, and today the overall market is swooning in a most remarkable way.

U.S. stocks plunged, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s erasing its biggest rally this year, on concern that slowing growth in Europe will hurt the American economy as the Federal Reserve ends its bond purchases.

All 10 of the main S&P 500 groups dropped at least 0.8 percent, with energy stocks plunging 3.5 percent to pace losses.

In a general way, a falling stock market is supposed to be good for gold, and this seems to hold true this week, although only in a modest way:

A combination of heavy short covering in the futures market, bargain hunting and safe-haven buying boosted the yellow metal.

After dropping well below $1200 early in the week, spot gold (the price of concern to Cash For Gold) rallied to about $1225.

For those who keep score, that is right where Goldman Sachs, a year ago, said gold would be around the end of 2014.

From our point of view, when gold behaves this way, your pawnbroker is your friend: If you need to convert your gold to greenbacks, you probably don’t want to sell at these price levels. But you can take out a pawn loan, reclaim your gold in 30 to 60 days and hope for higher prices in the future.

#mauipawn #mauigold #mauishopping

 

Keeping busy

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This morning I went to the breakfast meeting of the Rotary Club of Upcountry Maui, to see two high schoolers receive the club’s Students of the Month awards. They were an impressive pair, and I will relay a little about them in a moment, but what I found noteworthy was the variety (and, apparently, also depth) of the opportunities students have today.

There was nothing close to it when I was in high school, 50 years ago.

Of course, not all students get the same opportunities. Money and transportation would prevent some. Babysitting obligations would stop others.

But the opportunities are there for both private and public school students.

It is nearly impossible, in some circles, to bring up the topic of education without being subjected to a tirade against public schools. And teachers. And unions.

I spent a lot of time on campus when my children were in high school, and what I saw was generally good. Certainly far better than the Catholic school I went to. I do not believe that anyone pushing vouchers has the interests of the students uppermost. And religious schools are, with some but not many exceptions, antieducational.

The selectees were Jamie Gomes from King Kekaulike High and Josh Higa from Kamehameha Schools Maui. As you can see from the photograph, happy-looking kids.

Jamie said she had been thinking of becoming a family physician until attending a boot camp at Berkeley last summer where she observed a knee operation and is now wondering if becoming an orthopedic surgeon wouldn’t be better.

She plays water polo and for her community service requirement has started Operation JAG (Jamie Against Bullying) to go to the community with a message. She would like to attend Oregon State and then Oregon University of Health Sciences medical school.

Josh wants to become a botanist, with an interest in native plants. He’s been learning about the Hawaiian uses of plants as medicine — la’au lapaau. He does judo and runs cross-country and is studying Japanese in school. He has been on reef and park cleaning trips.

He has Northern Arizona and Pacific on his college list.

There were quite a few other items on Jamie’s and Josh’s busy lists, and I asked Josh’s mother Terilyn if she worries about burnout. “Yes,” she said.

But I think the kids will be all right.

150 guitars in a DAY

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I’ll say we are jealous, but then Maui is not Austin.

guitar2

This piece from the Austin Chronicle is one of the longest features about a pawnshop we’ve ever read, but the CashAmerica (formerly and famously Doc Holliday’s) shop on South Lamar is a different kind of cat. Austin’s huge music scene supports a huge instrument market:

If pawnshops hold rock & roll together, then the vast CashAmerica on South Lamar is what longtime employee Ian Doherty calls, “The big bottle of wood glue that holds all the broken guitars together. We make it happen for all the musicians who are struggling to get where they’re going. Even the really big-shot guys still have bills coming up.”

Maui’s music scene, while vibrant, is nowhere near as big as Austin’s where hundreds, if not thousands of bands play at SXSW, and the South Lamar shop claims to have sold 150 guitars on opening day one year.

 

guitar1

It is not made clear whether 150 bands showed up without guitars, or 150 kids were so inspired by the groove that they went right down and got their starter axes at CashAmerica.

Kamaaina Loan And Cash For Gold will not sell 150 guitars in a day. The two photographs show about two-thirds of our display inventory at 96 N. Market this morning. We like to think that our prices are as good as the musicians enjoy in Austin, and we can confirm that our pawnshop (96 N. Market, a few steps down the street from the guitars) has helped many a Maui musician between gigs pay the rent.

And here’s a pro trick you may not know. Quite a few musicians going on tour pawn their spare instruments. We store them in our bonded, insured warehouse. When the tour is over, the players reclaim their stuff, which is a lot safer way of ensuring their gear than leaving it behind and asking a friend to look after it.

 

#mauimusic #mauiguitar #mauipawn #mauiloan

 

Sell us your gold

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We at Kamaaina Loan And Cash For Gold buy and sell gold every day. It matters to us whether the world gold market is up or down but we cannot do anything about that. Here is a Bloomberg News story that is very down on gold:

“There are no compelling reasons to be in gold,” said Brian Levitt, a New York-based economist at OppenheimerFunds Inc., which manages $251.4 billion. “There are no inflationary pressures. You have a central bank that’s going to tighten sooner than most of its trading partners. That to me portends a strong dollar and weaker gold prices.”

What that seems to mean is that if you are thinking you might sell gold anytime in the next little while, now is the time to do it.

Ditto for silver, which fell under $18 an ounce for the first time in a long while last week.

#mauigold #mauipawn #mauiloanIMG_3682

Gold price is down; reasons to feel good about that

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Gold futures have declined, trading near the bottom of their recent price range, which is $1240 an ounce. (The spot price, which is what Kamaaina Loan uses to buy or lend on gold, is a little higher, about $1253 this morning; silver is below $19, which is the low end of its range, too.)

Thank goodness somebody is buying this stuff

Thank goodness somebody is buying this stuff

When the futures price is lower than the spot price, that suggests the big traders are expecting the price to continue to decline, according to Kitco.

So why should anyone feel good about that? Well, as pawnbrokers dealing in gold, we don’t feel especially good about it; but there is a bigger world out there, and falling gold prices generally (but maybe not always) suggest that people feel pretty good about the future. Despite bad news — fighting in Ukraine and Iraq and Syria, disease wrecking the already not-too-good economies of west Africa, nervousness about elections in America and Scotland, apparently “people” are feeling pretty chipper.

Well, what people? People who control the bulk of the world’s gold exchanges.

And why should we think they have an especially good handle on the future? Now, that is a complicated question. The short answer is that studies have shown that among people who make predictions (which is what futures trading is all about), the trend among the many tends (but only tends) to make a better forecast than any one particular guru.

In the Financial Times, Tim Harford reports (“How to see into the future”) on a study that supposedly supports that idea. Of course, for every trader who offered a pessimistic price, there was another who disagreed with him, but the trend is supposed to be the thing. And the price trend is down.

(There are some real problems with the study, the main one being that its time frame is so short, with participants being asked to make predictions one year out. As we know too painfully, someone who forecast in 2006 that the stock market would crash [and there were such people] was only too right, but he would have looked wrong for the next year and more.)

Anyhow, so the theory goes, precious metals are a refuge in times of trouble, and so when people are expecting trouble, they should be bidding the price up. Instead, the big money is bidding it down, which ought to forecast rosy dawns and blue skies ahead.

#mauipawn #mauiloan #mauigold #gold

 

 

Save those receipts

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A customer came in today with a Niihau shell necklace she was interested in selling.  We, of course, were interested in buying.

Niihau shell jewelry is particularly tricky because without documentation  there is no direct way to tell whether it is authentic. Fortunately, she had retained the Certificate of Authenticity that came with the necklace when she bought it.

 

American_Express_Shipping_Receipt_1853

Certificates can be copied, however, so a sales receipt helps add value. The more documentation , the better. A sales receipt, by itself, proves little, but a collection of papers for an item adds value. This is also true of designer bags and similar items.

The receipt might seem like clutter, but if you paid hundreds of dollars for an item, and someday you might want to sell it (or use it to raise a pawn loan),  that slip of paper might add many dollars to the amount you realize.

How would you use old Maui High?

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The county has published a bid notice seeking ideas to “use and repurpose” the old Maui High campus in Hamakuapoko. And please don’t call it H’poko.

What do you think?

For decades after the school closed, it housed the NifTAL agricultural; research project, and the old gymnasium was used as a community dance rehearsal hall until some creep burned it down.

#Mauihigh #mauiland

 

 

‘Pawn Stars Live!’ is dying

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The attempt to parody the uber-popular reality show and sell tickets on the Las Vegas Strip has failed.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports the show will close Aug. 24. (And who knew that denizens of n City call themselves Las Vegans? What kind of vegans are they?)

Even a complete rewrite and a move to another theater failed to resuscitate the show, which most critics said had misfired. It was probably a mistake to think of parodying a reality show anyway. Isn’t “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” already a parody? Satire might have fared better, but they say satire is what closes on Saturday.

Warning to the west side

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Have you been following Eileen Chao’s coverage in The Maui News of the plan to close Molokini II, the child/adolescent psychiatric ward at Maui Memorial Medical Center? You should, especially if you live on the west side and fantasize about having an emergency room there, so you won’t have to lose that “golden hour” riding an  ambulance to Wailuku if you have a stroke.

It ain’t ever going to happen, and the reasons are right there in today’s story:

1. Molokini II had 124 patients last year. Considering that psychiatric admissions last only for the acute attack and seldom last more than a few days, that means that much of the time the unit was empty.

Yet it still had to have staff ready around the clock.

There is no adolescent psychiatrist practicing on the island, and not likely to be any time soon either.

2. No other hospital on the Neighbor Islands has an adolescent psych unit.

Now, consider an emergency room. It requires, at the barest minimum, 5 ER physicians, one for each 8-hour shift each weekday and 2 more to cover weekends, vacations etc.

Plus nurses and other helpers.

Most of these cannot be used on other tasks whenever there isn’t an emergency case, because they have to be ready to respond STAT as you have seen so often on the TV doc shows.

But there won’t be many patients from the west side, and if you have been around ER physicians you’ll have noticed that they are not shrinking violets. They are not going to sit around playing hanafuda waiting for the next big car crash (and how many of those does Lahaina generate? not even one a day).

If you have a condition requiring Level 3 care, you’ll have to leave Maui anyway.

As medical care gets more complicated and equipment becomes more specialized and expensive, economic factors force concentration. Health treatment is not immune to the same forces that have closed down full-service gas stations in favor of gasoline0-dispensing stations one place and car repair shops somewhere else.

There are other reasons the west side (or South Maui) will never have an ER but those are sufficient; we don’t need to go any further.

#mauihospital #westmauihospital #mauimedical