These hard asset investments include companies that own and produce an underlying natural resource.
The other three asset classes are for appreciation: U.S. stocks, foreign stocks and hard asset stocks.
Not all of the top armchair gurus bet the ranch on hard asset stocks.
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Citigroup at 70 percent of hard asset value also comes to mind.
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The easiest way to make an investment is to buy a piece of gold - a hard asset that can be stored at home.
That stimulus, mostly in the form of fixed asset investments in infrastructure, followed by low interest rates, fueled a hard asset bubble that the Chinese government has been trying to pop since last year.
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The result soon was skyrocketing oil, gold and other hard-asset prices, and general inflation.
There have been some worries among hard-asset investors about when the Federal Reserve might begin to peel back its ultra-loose monetary policy.
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You have a number of problems buying financial assets that you don't have on the hard-asset side, where you can have some control over running those businesses.
Call it a speculative mania if you must, but zero interest rates are forcing otherwise cautious cash savers the world over to seek out hard-asset protection for their wealth.
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Whatever team she puts in place, Miss Megawati seems unlikely to press hard for asset sales from the bank-restructuring agency, for deep cuts in subsidies, or for reducing the government's influence over small business and agriculture.
Some people would have a hard time connecting asset management at a large insurance company with entrepreneurial.
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Even in states where local rules make civil asset forfeiture hard, police can get around that problem by calling in the feds.
"The dichotomy between hard economic data and asset market performance continues but unlike over past weeks at least there was some justification for the rally in equity markets following the stronger than expected US April jobs report, " said a market commentary from Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong.
Latin America has a few asset-seizing hard-left governments, notably Argentina and Venezuela, but inequality has also fallen in countries following a more orthodox economic course, such as Chile and Colombia.
But not even they will want to invest all their country's hard-won wealth in one asset, especially a depreciating one.
Wake up, hard work and dedication becomes an asset in life!
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It was during those hard times that Harvard combined cautious asset management with a strategy of adding genuine value in the form of improved academic quality.
Bank of America are all outperforming the market dramatically over the past six months, while gold, eternally seen as a safe asset, is down hard in the same time period.
Not surprisingly, asset write-downs are hard to find and require expertise in financial footnotes to identify.
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But the hard part is knowing how much an asset-price rally is rooted in genuinely rising prosperity and how much in government policies that can't last.
Regulators are playing hardball, some say maybe too hard, in their effort to prevent future asset bubbles.
This freshly minted cash would then flee into hard assets, and off goes a new asset bubble.
Asset disposals, one obvious way of raising cash, are extremely hard to pull off at the moment.
NFL's even-handedness is hard to value, yet it may prove the league's most important asset should other American sports continue to face battles between the haves and the have-nots.
So Turkish strength, in terms of hard power, of soft power, in terms of economic relations, is an asset for any American administration.
If they see it as a revenue-generating asset, clearly it's going to take a great deal of hard work to build those revenue streams.
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