30+% markups on gold and all kinds of scams risk spooking investors. Gold bugs like to think they have all their bases covered. The price of the precious metal can only go up whether the economy is facing inflation or deflation, or so they claim. Lilli Day | Photodisc | Getty Images But beyond the lack of evidence for the metal's value thriving in either scenario, gold investors now face a situation that even they can't put a positive spin on. Major gold vendors like Goldline are coming under rapidly rising scrutiny for steering customers into coins with markups of 35 percent. Salespeople imply that investors could exploit a loophole for antique coins to avoid a government confiscation of gold that supposedly took place during the Great Depression. But investors who try to sell the coins see a sharp drop as the market value tends to be less the huge profits pocketed by the vendor. Fear-Mongering and Conflicts of Interest Fear-mongering by those who, like Fox News host Glenn Beck, have lucrative deals with gold vendors has been causing angst about conflicts of interest for months. But reports of customers getting put into investments that lose a third of their value upon purchase are causing a new sense of alarm. http://www.cnbc.com/id/38487460
well if 30% markup is normal, then you can buy it for 130% value and then sell it for 125% value on ebay and really only 5% is gone (or something like that). it makes my head hurt to know that so many people so unfamiliar with reality get jobs writing for real companies.
Anybody with a brain checks the spot price of gold before buying or selling gold, and only trades with dealers who post both buy and sell prices and have a spread for retail quantities (1 oz or so) of no more than about 3%. So I fail to see why the existence of sleazy operators has anything to do with whether the price of gold is going to go up or down. The fiscal actions of Congress and the Fed are infinitely more important. The people who get scammed by goldline are the same people who should never buy a car because they're going to get scammed by the auto dealer.