Here's a comment posted yesterday by a reader at Bill Murphy's Le Metropole Cafe that got my attention.
Bill,
This recent long anticipated, and highly welcomed price action in gold and silver is starting to remind me of the way gold and silver started their rise to their eventual blow off back in the late 70's. Of course we are just starting to correct the massive imbalance created over the last 15 years of official suppression.
In the late 70's and early 80 we didn't start the rapid rise with 0% interest rates. We did not have massive trade imbalances. We did not have federal budget deficits amounting to a significant % of GDP. We did not have 18% + unemployment. We were not primarily a "service economy". We still made our own toasters, and TV's. We did not have years worth of single family houses in inventory unsold. We did not have three wars including one against an ill defined enemy with a name but no homeland.
We had much less government regulation. We did not have half of the workers in the US on some form of government payroll. We did not have a huge % of the population on food stamps. We did not have the preponderance of "official" lies telling us the state of the economy. We did not have huge rewards for people that couldn't pay for their overextended housing purchases. We did not have a huge avalanche of new taxes and regulations already cooked into law. We did not have half of the world wanting an alternative to the US $ as the global reserve currency. We did not have an administration bowing to and taking orders from bankers. We did not have a dumbed down, apathetic population. We did not have 100:1 fractional reserve of precious metals ignored by the population.
We did not have a dozen propaganda media outlets feeding the party line to unsuspecting private investors daily. We did not have trillion $ giveaways to their banking masters. We did not have trillion $ rip offs orchestrated by get-out-of-jail-free bankers. We did not have a world full of central bankers willing to dump their gold in an attempt to prop their paper. We did not start the 70's run with unprecedented financial stress in global finance. We did not have out of control bankers creating quadrillions of $s in fraudulent financial paper bets called derivatives. We did not have a world flooded with trillions of $ in fraudulent bonds.
The point is, it's different today. Financially, things at the start of this acceleration in PM prices are significantly different. Significantly worse. We are in serious risk of hyperinflation in the US. Back in the late 70's talk was of $1,000 gold and $50 silver. We got close to hitting both just as the bubble popped. There was a significantly more sound US financial picture then.
Today we can read predictions of gold at many tens of thousands of $ per oz... silver at thousands of $s per oz. It is indeed scary to think that these predictions of metals prices could be too low! My point is this is not the time to be thinking of taking "profit" in physical metal. Trade PM stocks if you want the "action", or if you want to realize some paper profit, but hold on to any physical you have with a death grip.
That sums it up pretty nicely, I think. Guess I'm not alone in feeling like I do. Don't sell... in the long run you'll be sorry you did. And you really don't want to hear an old man admonishing "I told you so!"
by carefully tracking who owns the metals via 1099's and whatever other means they have for monitoring. 
