Reza Pahlavi is the "Crown Prince of Iran" ...

... in, at most, the same sense that Franz von Bayern is "by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith."

But really, not even that much.

The form of the regime that James Francis Edward Stuart and his Jacobite "pretenders" attempted to assume chiefdom of  by "succession," starting in 1701 with the death of the exiled James II/VII, remains in existence.

The Iranian monarchy itself -- not just a particular Shah -- was extirpated nearly half a century ago.

Pahlavi's claim is pretty much a dead parrot.

Can Any of Y'All Explain This?

I am not an "investor" as popularly (as opposed to technically) defined, nor do I play one on TV or the Internet. To put that a different way, I do not engage in ongoing trade of stocks, commodities, etc. for the purpose of finding and exploiting specific profit opportunities, nor have I put a lot of study into the practices involved in doing so.

That may explain why I find recent headlines (for example, this morning, "Gold and silver in freefall as investors flee safe haven metals trade") and associated charts (both gold and silver seem to be down about 20% over the last month, with most of the fall occuring over the last 10 days or so), somewhat counter-intuitive and confusing.

My intuitive understanding of the situation is that this is when investors should be BUYING, not SELLING, gold and silver -- things are looking pretty bad and set to get worse, so get the hell out of the volatile sectors and put some gold bars in the safe until things settle down.

Why is the opposite happening?

The two explanations I can think of are:

1. Investors think the bottom is in or near to being in on the stock market (which has also been down over the last month, but not by as much as metals), and are selling their metal to buy stocks cheap before the Dow heads back up; and/or
2. Investors are moving out of metal and into petroleum as a commodity to take advantage of the spikes associated with the war.

Both of which seem a lot more risky/speculative -- to me, anyway -- than just sitting on a pile of Krugerrands. If things get back to normal, those metals will still hold long-term value. If things go completely to shit, well, let me quote from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

[P]articularly at times like 28 November 1941 ... even a grunt like Bobby Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver than piles of old cut-up newspaper. ... This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire.

The piles of cut-up newspaper in the quote are Chinese currency, which even as late as December 1941 were, unlike US Federal Reserve Notes today, at least theoretically backed by metal.

I happen to know that at least some of KN@PPSTER's readers are or have been "investors" in the popular definition mentioned above. Can any of you explain to me why now would be the time to get out of metals and into something else?

Wordle 1738 Hint

Hint: Think Times New Roman (as opposed to, say, Helvetica).

Not Enough? Get the first letter of today's Wordle after the ad below.

New to Wordle? You can play it at the New York Times, and here are some thoughts on how I go about solving each day's puzzle.

First Letter: S