That's Right! I almost died when I went downstairs for my first cup of coffee of the day. I'll tell you how below the little orange turd...
First I need to give you a little bit of background about me so you understand what happened-
Not many people around here know me. I've been a lurker for a while, posting comments rarely (except for when my insomnia decides to pull an all-nighter), and have written a couple small diaries. Most people might remember me from my talking about my Closet Progressive Democrat Husband who pretends he is a staunch, Faux News watching, daily talking points digested with his morning coffee, tow the party line Republican. I love the man dearly, especially when I'm proving to him that his latest talking point is an outright lie, which he hates but loves me for. We are a true case of opposites attracting, but that's not what got me going today.
My insomnia had me up past the early morning hours this morning, and even beyond the time when most of my neighbors head out to work. I luckily work from home, a retired geriatric nurse who now writes family history books and has a small lapidary and jewelry business on the side, which after the Great Recession will be what we do in our retirement to survive. My husband also works in the our business and is a Senior Level Main Frame Specialist for the largest financial data transfer firm in the world during his daylight hours, and often during the night. He works from home most of the time, so to create peaceful working space for us both our offices are as far from each other as possible, mine on the uppermost level at the back of the house and his on the lowest level at the front. Both my husband and myself are disabled, but work as hard as we can to afford a decent life for ourselves, proud to be able to to still work even though we both have physical limitations.
My husband's office is right next to the family room, and he usually has the TV on Fox News in the morning, listening to it as he works at his computer. I often come down to the kitchen to get my morning coffee and am assaulted and insulted by whatever their talking heads are caterwauling about that morning as I pour my first cup. This morning it went beyond the pale for me and it wasn't even the usual morning drivel they're famous for, it was a commercial from a company that seems to love Faux News, Roslin Capital.
Their usual bull about starting a gold and silver market account to make a killing and how good it feels to handle your hard earned cash that is oh-so-quickly sent to you in gold and silver coins annoys me whenever I hear it, but the latest commercial (which just began airing this week) made my heart stop this morning when I heard it for the first time after only two hours of restless sleep. I actually went downstairs and rewound the DVR to make sure I had heard correctly before I let my body almost stop functioning.
The newest ad from Roslin Capital is all about the idea that you should roll over any IRA's you have and roll them into a gold and silver market account because it's a much safer investment, since you have the metals sitting in your safe and can feel like a financial wizard just by opening the door and running the coins through your fingers.When I confirmed I had actually heard their bad actor from the 80's and 90's front guy say this in no uncertain terms, I swear my heart skipped a few beats and I had a hard time breathing for several seconds.
To most people this ad wouldn't make them blink an eye, hell, they probably wouldn't even understand exactly what this asshat was actually saying, but working as a jeweler it made me want to vomit. We work primarily in silver, but my husband is a Master Bench Jeweler with over forty years of experience, and he occasionally will work in gold for special custom orders for a few of our good clients (we are primarily a custom design house).
We watched as the gold and silver market exploded over the last five years, seeing silver go for $15 an ounce to over $50, and have watched as both the silver and gold market plunged over the last few months. We understand why the gold market was so volatile, since it has always been that way, but we were unhappy with what was going on with silver, since we knew there was nothing backing that bubble up, and when it finally completely deflated (which it looks to have done the last few months) we knew there would be many who lost their shirts, just like when it had a partial collapse about three years ago.
We had begun, over the last couple of years, to buy fine silver, alloy it ourselves, roll out our own sheet, and pull our own wire, not only to save on fabrication fees but to guarantee the products we sell (since the price began rising we'd run into issues with some of our suppliers, due to them selling silver that was overly alloyed, making it cheap crap that was less than sterling and worthless for us to use). We watch the metal market closely and some days I feel like I've learned far more about this than the average retired nurse who now writes genealogy books should ever know about this aspect of finance.
The thing that almost killed me was the fact that a financial firm, whose sole business is supposed to be helping to create financial security for its investors, was blatantly lying and pushing people into investing in a market that is not only extremely chancy and a bad investment for those with little to no understanding how the gold and silver market actually works (it takes years to fully understand all the variables involved), but that they were pushing the idea of using a person's retirement savings to finance this craziness.
Luckily, this company only advertises on Faux News and RW radio, so their target audience is RWNJ's and the Tea Party faction, who usually have little money to invest, since most of it is spent on beer, internet porn, ammo, oversized tires for their trucks, and the latest hunting and gun magazines, but the idea that a financial company could get away with this type of blatant lying in their advertising more than floored me. I thought there we had laws concerning truth in advertising, but like everything else on this prefabricated news channel, I guess the truth really has no place there, in any form.
To my mind, an ad like this, after what Wall Street did to our economy and to most people's retirement savings in 2007-2009, is not only unconscionable, it's outright fraud. Reputable financial advisors tell clients that investing in the metals markets is unpredictable at best, and without a good working knowledge of how that aspect of the market actually works, is not a good investment for the average small time investor looking to increase their savings for their golden years.
After seeing our own retirement savings and many others almost completely stolen by Wall Street and Banks "too big to fail", to see an ad like this was just too much, especially when I'd had little to no sleep. I thought that after the last couple of decades there was virtually nothing that would surprise me when it came to The Right and what they would say or do, but this morning I was more then surprised by the awfulness of this company's ad, I was sickened in my soul. Am I just having a bad case of wishful thinking when I hope for common sense and truth from this overly vocal minority in our country, or has the sleaziness of Wall Street, Big Business and the Far Right really sunk so low that they want to steal the last few pennies from Grandma to feed their already overfull coffers?
My heart screams "NO!", but my mind asks "Are you really surprised to see them openly admitting that that's exactly what they want to do?"