When Gold Goes Up
“Gold is saying something,” writes Bloomberg columnist Mark Gilbert.
What’s it saying? Nobody knows. Well, at least nobody who works at The Daily Reckoning. We listen. We hear. But we still don’t know what the hell gold is talking about. The yellow metal is speaking in riddles.
Yesterday, gold spoke again. It rose $4 to a new record high of $1,296. Tomorrow, it will probably hit yet another record – possibly over $1,300.
In the conventional wisdom, gold is telling us to watch out. Inflation is coming. Either the regular kind…the kind that comes with “growth”…or the kind that comes with the “hyper” modifier. Almost everyone likes the regular kind. Almost no one likes the hyper kind.
But being the contrary coots that we are, we’re inclined to think that there will be many a slip between the cup of $1,300 gold and the puckered lips of gently rising inflation levels.
Watch out, dear reader, watch out.
Not that we’re dissing gold or sassing the goldbugs. Not at all. We think it’s going to $1,500…and then to $3,000. But next week?
Don’t know. We have to keep listening…trying to interpret the whispers.
There’s something all together too obvious and too easy about the gold market now. It just goes up. Year after year. Maybe it’s a trap.
In 2000, there was a crash in dot.coms. The whole magic of the tech bubble suddenly disappeared. And guess what? Gold went up.
In 2001, the War on Terror began. And guess what? Gold went up again.
And again in 2002. And 2003. And 2004.
By 2005, the world economy was in the throes of a massive financial bubble. Everything was going up. Gold went up too.
In 2006, the US had a major housing bubble on its hands. Gold went up.
In 2007, the housing bubble started to lose air. Gold went up.
In 2008, Wall Street stared into the abyss. Lehman Bros. went broke. The feds took over housing finance, auto-making, insurance, commercial lending…and gold went up.
In 2009, the feds went all out to try to engineer a recovery. The Fed ballooned its balance sheet by $1.2 trillion. The federal budget went into deficit by nearly one and a half trillion. Still, gold went up.
And what’s this? The recession officially ended more than a year ago. Housing and unemployment are still limping. De-leveraging is still underway (David Rosenberg calls it a “depression”)…and go figure. Gold is still going up.
Is there anything that can stop gold from going up?
We don’t know. But many smart people are coming to the conclusion that they can’t lose with gold. If the economy recovers…gold is a cinch to go up along with inflation. If the economy falters…gold will go up when the Fed comes to the rescue with more printing press money.
And then, there are the Chinese. God knows they like gold. And they don’t have much of it. If they’re behind this gold market it could last for another 20 years.
So gold is a “can’t lose” investment.
We like gold. But we don’t like “can’t lose” investments. What to do?
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