FYI | Oct 20 2010
By Tim Price
"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering, jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."
William Butler Yeats.
For a pink paper, one might have thought that the Financial Times would have greater affinity with a yellow metal, but no – its long, tiresome antipathy towards gold staggers on. (If and when the FT ever turns positive on gold, we will know that the high is close at hand.) The latest manifestation of its auric antagonism is James Mackintosh's "Short View" of 14th October, in which he
"compares gold's climb to other market bubbles"..
Note that reference to "other.. bubbles" as if gold's steady appreciation – merely the flip side of a fast devaluing dollar – was a case-closed proven example of what the OED refers to as "anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty or worthless.. often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes.” That sounds a lot more like the global fiat monetary system or like fractional reserve banking than this innocent metal that has outlived every paper currency as a store of value for the past few thousand years. But then the reality is that there are still plenty of people who simply don't get it – which is another reason to think that the "bubble" in gold (and silver) still has plenty of scope for further, erm, inflation.
Mackintosh deploys some nifty chartist legerdemain, overlaying the recent price history of gold against previous bubble outbreaks, such as that of the Roaring Twenties:
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One might almost call this yellow journalism (biased opinion masquerading as objective fact). Selective comparisons with prior bubbles are just that – selective. One might just as reasonably overlay the price of gold with the price of the FT itself, which has doubled since 2007, or with the price of an online subscription, which in just over three years has risen from GBP65 to more than GBP170. Is the FT a bubble ?
The harsh reality is that with most western governments raping their own currencies in a quite possibly futile race to the bottom, and with QE2 steaming towards port, driving up asset prices almost indiscriminately, the business of objective investment analysis is almost impossible – a practically existential crisis for any asset manager who takes his job seriously.
As management consultant Andreas Acavalos puts it,
"..the problem of economic calculation under a fiat money regime is fundamentally insoluble. It cannot be solved for exactly the same reason that you cannot solve the problem of "measuring" a length of cloth with an elastic tape measure. The only "solution" is to throw away the elastic and use a yardstick that cannot be stretched at will.
"Since it is unfortunately not within our power, as ordinary citizens, to do away with fiat money, we have to live with it and manage our affairs accordingly; we must, in other words, take rational economic decisions in the context of an irrational monetary regime that distorts relative prices and renders them increasingly meaningless as guides of where to invest.
"Here, I think, is where the role of gold comes in: acquiring gold is not an investment. It is a conscious decision to REFRAIN from investing until an honest monetary regime makes rational calculation of relative asset prices possible. In this sense, gold plays a quintessentially monetary role: it permits you to postpone your investment decisions and to keep your options open for future investment. As awareness of this function of gold (and silver) increases, its price relative to other assets (including fiat currencies) rises. This is what we have witnessed over the last several years."
And yes, of course, the price of gold could easily retrace some of its recent gains. But for gold and silver prices to collapse (or for these supposed bubbles to "burst") would require a sudden and hugely unlikely rediscovery of mass fiscal and monetary credibility on the part of G7 governments who are currently slashing at the value of their own paper currencies like Freddie Krueger, perpetuating the already overly long Nightmare on Wall Street.
I am grateful to TD's Jonathan Escott for sharing the following FT editorial dating back to April 2004, at which point the gold price was US$400 an ounce. Selected highlights for those who appreciate their irony served full-fat include:
"For private investors to hold gold.. is their own foolish affair.. holding gold is irrational in the first place.."
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As irrational as taking unsolicited and thus far catastrophically vile investment advice from financial journalists ?
Tim Price
Director of Investment
PFP Wealth Management
18th October 2010.
Email: tim.price@pfpg.co.uk Weblog: http://thepriceofeverything.typepad.com
The views expressed above are the author's and not FNArena's (see our disclaimer).
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