Billions of dollars of unsold diamonds are piling up around the world
markets.businessinsider.com
markets.businessinsider.com
Its quite old (from 1982), but some things might still be relevant today. The article leaves you with the strong impression that the market is highly controlled by a few players, and a diamond is not really an asset you would like to invest in.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-production-by-country/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/blood-diamonds-revised-edit...
They could be more commodified than they are, but they can never achieve the commodification of a metal or a simple gas like e.g. nitrogen.
Diamond traders do exist but due to the characteristics of individual diamonds, they're more like bond traders. Bluenile.com is a good example of a retail diamond exchange.
This helpful link explains what and why
It just represents way too much in their heads.
For what's worth my girlfriend already made it clear that she would be very upset if I ever bought her such expensive jewellery, precisely because of lost opportunity cost in things like enjoyable trips through Europe, attending concerts/plays and that sort of actually meaningful experiences. So hey, there goes your theory?
“Bold statement to make about 3,500,000,000 people”
Wow... you must have very busy tinder profile. :D
I’d love to be able to convince her that the ring money would do great in a Vanguard fund instead :p.
Edit: Looks like I have to put this disclaimer, for many people the things I listed above are milestones (not for all).
Some will hear nothing more than 'not a diamond', and some will say 'you wasted how much'.
What're you going to do, if you're even thinking about it you're obviously set on her, so it only matters how she feels about them to the extent that you know!
Well, if one person makes a blanket statement about all individuals in a group, and the other disproves that with a single individual to which the statement does not apply, one of them clearly is more right than the other.
I don't have any statistics, but it seems obvious the group of women desiring diamonds is bigger (to say the least) than the group of women not interested by them.
Without generalization there can be no reasoning, because you can always find outliers that disprove any claim.
So no, (1) you don't have any data, to even say "most" women do, and (2) that's not what the guy I replied to said, he said "all" women.
Suggested spending guideline: if you’re well off, spend about what you would on what you’d consider to be a great but not ridiculous gaming rig on her engagement present, and make sure she wouldn’t rather have a great gaming rig, sewing machine, musical instrument, etc. than a ring.
Addendum: I was later upset when he sold all his stocks during the 2008 crash because he thought he’d need the cash for our wedding - the wedding my parents were happily paying for, because Texas. A little more communication on both our parts would have prevented that loss.
Deciding to get married is wonderful. Congratulations! But sometimes people have a mental image of the sitcom scene where the one partner astounds the other by suddenly getting on one knee and plunking $30K on their hand. On reflection, that may not be the right way for people to start their life together, is all I'm saying.
Some other friendly tips: you can secretly measure your partner’s finger size to get the perfect ring without them suspecting.
Going through the effort of getting the ring and sizing it properly without them suspecting shows how much you care and will yield you a better outcome than discussing this matter directly with them ;)
Edit: this is obviously with the assumption that you’ve at decided to get married. The surprise is about the ring not the marriage.
It can be a romantic outing in and of itself. I took my wife ring shopping to a half dozen stores in a beautiful fall afternoon. We didn't but anything, that was never the plan. I just wanted to see what rings made her face light up, then I made a much cheaper purchase on my own time.
It seems to be best if both partners have discussed and agreed on marriage prior to the actual proposal, and it would then make sense to also have discussed the kind of ring (or price class of ring at least) that they would want.
Exactly what ring you get can be a surprise of course, but I think the price tag should be somewhat known beforehand.
If by "you" you mean me, I've been married since 86. (I understand that you may have meant a generic "you.")
FWIW, we didn't buy a ring. I can't say we took that money and put it to use X but in the first years of marriage we certainly had some months where we were only able to pay bills by looking under the couch cushions for quarters, so I think it was a sound direction, for us.
Looking for the stone together was entertaining after I was able to get him to understand that I really, really didn’t expect him to spend the “two months' salary” that is “customary” in my home country (USA).
If you want the romantic surprise, arrange a nice, private dinner (or other private special occasion) and get a silver CZ ring to present as a placeholder for the ring she’s going to help you pick out, making it clear that it’s a placeholder. If this does not go over well, better to find this out about her before making a big legal commitment!
A true life partner will want to choose their own ring, and in particular, will want to think rationally about all of the other things you could do together with that money.
I would instead look at Moissanite[0]; looks better, holds it's value a little bit better although debeers has killed a second hand market for this kind of jewellry..
After proposing, you have several options:
* If she wants a diamond or moissanite or CZ or other ring, the two of you can go shopping for it later, or commission a custom one.
* If she doesn't want an expensive ring, you can spend it on other things.
* If she gets extremely upset and refuses just because you should have gotten a diamond ring the first time, you might want to rethink whether you want to spend your life with this person.
I say this as someone who likes the idea of moissanite, but relented to getting an "ethical" diamond from Canada (there is some dispute about provenance of these diamonds).
In other words, this isn't a hill to die on.
I wonder if the excess supply of diamonds would lower the price, since they're such a valuable and rare commodity.
What now happens to their families?
In India where diamonds are cut they also employ a million people.
What now happens to their families?
How about violins are not pulled out and instead we think about the million (an estimate from a NGO) Africans who work in artisan diamond mines, their work is horrific and vital to their families.
And something really hard, don't just ignore the fact their lives are ruined because we hate De Beers and think about what happens now and how can we fix this?
If you don't want to fix this, at least don't jump around with glee about the fact lives are ruined.
Unemployment is always a political choice.
It's easy to martyr other people.
If the output of the industry makes the world worse, then it makes sense to me to consider calling it an evil industry. Like, I have doubts about ad-tech, whether it benefits society.
But if on the other hand, it's just that an industry is lucrative and attracts evil people, I don't see that evil as accruing to the industry.
Mining stones and making pretty jewelry doesn't, that I can see, have any inherent component of injustice. I mean, there are diamonds mined in Canada; are they tainted somehow?
I could pay someone to break windows and then repair them, but that would be a bad thing.
*Worth to your lady, not to you Economically, the diamond is a token of wastefulness that serves only to destroy value as part of the human mating ritual. Bitcoin for women, but even less liquid.
>Smaller diamond producers have reduced their own prices. De Beers, a unit of mining group Anglo American, and its Russian competitor Alrosa have reportedly rejected price cuts and would rather allow buyers to pull out of previous contracts.
$5 they'll hold firm on their prices and just take tax credits in countries for "business losses".
These are fun semantics... if you can't liquidate your inventory for a substantial fraction of its "price" then I'd say that it simply doesn't have the value you've priced it at.
If there are only ten suckers in the world willing to buy a widget for a billion dollars, and you have a thousand of those widgets, then you're sitting on roughly ten billion dollars -- not a trillion.
De Beers created the demand artificially for engagement rings so they are pretty much done,I guess.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)