The Gold Economy

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With gold only few dollars shy of marking another all-time high, it’s appropriate to review the investment and central banking ramifications of gold at $1250/oz.

When approaching gold from the point of view of an investor, the first thing you should ask yourself is whether you think gold prices can rise by enough in the future to at least equal the returns you can lock in on risk-free investments. (I’ll ignore transactions and storage costs for the sake of simplicity.) To be attractive, any risky investment needs to at least promise to do better than the risk-free alternative

In Part 1 of this 5-part series, we discussed two agreements that Central Banks used to suppress the price of gold in the marketplace. Please read Part I before proceeding with this article.

So do the Central Banks still have gold?

A nice quote from the GATA article regarding availability of Canadian central bank gold:

When I published my essay “When Irish Eyes are Smiling: the story of Brian Mulroney and Canada’s gold,” the good folks at the Bank of Canada told me that there had been no physical gold in the bank vaults for years

In Part I, I alerted readers to the problem with using Western labels and Western analysis to analyze the gold markets of other nations – especially the two titans of the gold market: China and India. More specifically, I pointed out that breaking-down demand into the categories of “retail investment” and “jewelry” demand was both arbitrary and inaccurate.

In fact, much of the gold/silver acquired under both of those categories simply represents “savings”, rather than “investment” or the mere purchase of a luxury good (i.e. jewelry). Because of this inaccurate analysis, I suggested that (Western) analysts will