Gold. Oil. Gold. Oil. I know a lot of our readers are of the inflationary mindset but let me tell you — you guys get SO BORING sometimes when you go on about nothing but Peak Oil, your requiems in pace for Swiss bank accounts and the capacity of your average orifice for Krugerrands should you suddenly need to cross a border. So I was thrilled to see some new and novel hard-asset ideas in the latest Conversations with Casey newsletter. Well, after I skimmed the first several pages of talk of Switzerland and Krugerrands:

L[ouis James, of Casey's International Speculator]: Anything people should think of stashing, besides gold?

Doug: Well, they keep raising the taxes on cigarettes – a pack now costs $10 in some places in the U.S, that’s 50 cents per individual cigarette. If you’re American and are going to be storing things, you probably can’t go wrong building a stash of cigarettes. Even if you don’t smoke – or perhaps especially if you don’t smoke – every time you return to the U.S., you should buy the maximum amount of duty-free cigarettes allowed and store them.

The other thing Americans should do is buy a lot of shotgun shells, 9mm, .45, .223, and .308 ammo. Even if you don’t shoot, you can set those aside and store them too, because they’re going to be taxed and regulated to the nth degree. And properly stored, they keep for a very
long time.

In fact, anything regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms — one of the most corrupt, dangerous, and useless of all federal bureaucracies — is likely to go up considerably in both price and value. It’s perverse that the U.S. has a bureaucracy to regulate
the three things you need for a hunting trip or a good party. Maybe their next trick will be to convert the DEA into the Bureau of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

It’s certainly easier to store cigs, ammo and hooch than it is barrels of oil or agricultural commodities, so I see his point. And in the meantime, as you can see, the party is at Doug’s house. (And as an aside, if only Bernie Madoff could be contracted to write a guest column for LOLFed on using cigarettes as currency…)

And if you’re wondering what hard asset to not bother with:

L: What about diamonds?

Doug: I wouldn’t do diamonds. That’s a really specialist market, and diamonds have long seemed to me to be subject to artificial pricing. There are at least two separate technologies now that create totally flawless, real diamonds. They are indistinguishable from natural diamonds, except that they don’t have any flaws. But people will figure out how to introduce some flaws into those too, so I think the diamond market is in for a collapse at some time in the future. I could go on – let’s just say that for many reasons, diamonds are the
one gemstone I wouldn’t touch.

Take that, DeBeers! Though, speaking as a girl (and a materialistic one), I’m inclined to say hell-to-the-naw on the anti-diamond thesis — but okay, less subjectively, do any of you remember when Cramer was convinced that JCPenney was the second coming of retail, because they were selling moissanite stones that were “just as good as real diamonds” — and how badly Cramer’s theory flopped?

Anyway, none of this constitutes investment advice at all from us. But it’s all more fun to have around than paper money or Citigroup stock certificates, I think.