Sunday 22 February 2009

Gold hits a $1000 an ounce

"People are fearful of the combined impact of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing and the fiscal stimulus packages on future inflation. Investors are looking at both the solutions to the problem and the problem itself and realising that both are positive for the price of gold."

Natalie Dempster, World Gold Council

4 comments:

K T Cat said...

I really like gold miners for this reason. It seems to me that their profit margins just keep going up.

mike said...

How long before those countries holding gold reserves start selling in vast quantities? It must be very tempting. That in turn could cause a collapse in gold prices.
As for quantitative easing, it's a disgrace that this is about to happen. Effectively stealing from those who have saved. I am sure many investors will take a dim view of printing money.

Man in a Shed said...

@mike Gold could be another bubble. But I don't think it will burst just yet with the storm clouds over the Euro, Russia, Eastern Europe, the UK - OK everywhere.

Look at it this way what happened to the Zimbabwean dollar won't happen to gold, and that's why its worth holding. Not to make money, but to still be standing if the worse happens.

Anonymous said...

OK, what's happening is this: a currency is basically a way to exchange goods and services without having to directly exchange these things. Currencies work best when the value of the currency is fairly static.

When governments come out to play and start doing silly things like printing money to try to shrink their debts and the like, then we're into the situation where people can see that the currency units they hold are going to shrink in value, and so they look for something else scarce to buy that will hold value.

For historical reasons, gold doesn't have VAT applied to it in the EU; platinum, palladium, tantalum and so on would also be good candidates for currency unlikely to shrink, but these do have VAT applied to them, unfortunately.

What will happen is that gold will stay fairly high on average until the various governments stop diddling about with currencies and try to stabilise them, whereupon the huge number of investors holding gold will sell and re-invest in more normal equities.

Until then, we're going to be treated to a parade of political stupidity, waste and mismanagement until these fools run out of other peoples' money and are forced to settle down and stabilise their currencies.