All that glimmers

For all you "Caddyshack" fans, there is no god. But I do have a fleeting affinity for the one who enriches me, because it enables me to pay taxes and thus pay my share for civilization, enriching others. However, I will turn to Odin, Thor and Loki and the rest of Norse mythology, which, by the way, is my favorite explanation for the universe, before I bow to something buried in the ground. Yes, it's the gold bugs that bug me.

Gold investors, whether they admit it or not, denominate their investment in paper dollars. It is that conversion into something that can purchase goods and services that calibrates its worth. Until western society collapses and only a sliver of the metal, not a five-dollar bill, will buy a Big Mac and french fries, then gold is just a place to park dollars in the hope of making more dollars, the reason for all investments.

As George Bailey told Clarence, when the guardian angel remarked money wasn't needed in heaven: "Well, it comes in awfully handy down here."

All the gold in the world would not buy a Big Mac in such an outcome because the hamburger flippers and all the rest of us would be brigands bent on medieval-style looting and freebooting anyway. A kind of "we don't need no stinking badges" world.

To buy and hold it as the only true store of value seems irrational when the only way to realize the benefits is conversion into dollars. Should the fanciful apocalypse come and paper currency lose its power to persuade our republic to cohere, which some paranoid holders of gold expect and indeed appear to wish, then we are all in the soup.

A cellarful of it will hardly keep one warm and safe in a world lit only by the fire of torches and ruled by the mobs with pitchforks and machine guns.

I guess I've buried the lead, as we used to say in the newspaper trade, because it brings me to my latest "Manginius" point (more on the Jets and professional football culture in a future post).

I've taken the plunge and put my money where my mouth is. Recovery and inflation are coming and oil prices have bottomed. Yesterday, bought PowerShares DB Crude Oil Double Long ETN (DXO) at $2.24. This is a double-down (for all you blackjack players) on the price of oil. This exchange traded note is designed to go up or down twice as much as crude oil futures. I think it's going up. When (if) it does, I'll be looking to add alternative energy names.

I'm not buying oil because I think it's a superior god but because I expect its price in dollars to increase beyond the rate of inflation, enabling me to buy more goods and services and pay more taxes than otherwise would be the case. If you think the price of gold will increase, by all means buy and reap the benefits of more dollars. But genuflecting before a commodity (precious as it may be) is bad form. Just ask Moses.