Reply #11: please don't buy Diamonds and Tanzanite

[amazona]

It is more than just "heavily invested" -- that sounds quite passive -- terrorists in some areas are going into villages and chopping off people's limbs and leaving them alive to get people to leave diamond mining areas. Reports from Tanzania aren't as bad, but it still comes down to if a local wants to sell tanzanite, he has to sell to certain extremist Muslim buyers (Al Qaeda if you like) even though most Tanzanians themselves are of Christian or moderate Muslim persuasion.

I know some people shrug it off by saying they are buying Russian or other diamonds, but 1) some of these diamonds are laundered, and 2) in the case of Russian diamonds, there are quite a few un-tagged lab-created diamonds being slipped in.

The diamond market is softening, and sooner or later (probably sooner) the bottom will drop out because of the fraud issue. Too many people are going to learn they were sold a $50 piece of junk for $2,000 and it is going to knock the heart out of the market, and even the real stuff is going to sink. Look what happened to the coin market when it became known that a great many coins were actually fakes. Even the prices of the real coins was severely impacted.

Diamonds are a bad investment, and the day will come when you will be ashamed to wear them, so I say save your money.