• 288 days Will The ECB Continue To Hike Rates?
  • 288 days Forbes: Aramco Remains Largest Company In The Middle East
  • 290 days Caltech Scientists Succesfully Beam Back Solar Power From Space
  • 690 days Could Crypto Overtake Traditional Investment?
  • 695 days Americans Still Quitting Jobs At Record Pace
  • 697 days FinTech Startups Tapping VC Money for ‘Immigrant Banking’
  • 700 days Is The Dollar Too Strong?
  • 700 days Big Tech Disappoints Investors on Earnings Calls
  • 701 days Fear And Celebration On Twitter as Musk Takes The Reins
  • 703 days China Is Quietly Trying To Distance Itself From Russia
  • 703 days Tech and Internet Giants’ Earnings In Focus After Netflix’s Stinker
  • 707 days Crypto Investors Won Big In 2021
  • 707 days The ‘Metaverse’ Economy Could be Worth $13 Trillion By 2030
  • 708 days Food Prices Are Skyrocketing As Putin’s War Persists
  • 710 days Pentagon Resignations Illustrate Our ‘Commercial’ Defense Dilemma
  • 711 days US Banks Shrug off Nearly $15 Billion In Russian Write-Offs
  • 714 days Cannabis Stocks in Holding Pattern Despite Positive Momentum
  • 715 days Is Musk A Bastion Of Free Speech Or Will His Absolutist Stance Backfire?
  • 715 days Two ETFs That Could Hedge Against Extreme Market Volatility
  • 717 days Are NFTs About To Take Over Gaming?
Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs On Blue Chip Earnings

Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs On Blue Chip Earnings

Earnings season is well underway,…

How The Ultra-Wealthy Are Using Art To Dodge Taxes

How The Ultra-Wealthy Are Using Art To Dodge Taxes

More freeports open around the…

  1. Home
  2. Markets
  3. Other

Gold: Professor Wrong Says 'Don't Buy' Again

Phew! That was a close call from our tenured contrarian indicator...

YIKES! FOR ONE awful moment just then, I thought maybe the top was in.

"Gold has become the favored hedge against financial and monetary uncertainty," said Niall Ferguson, Harvard's financial history professor, on Monday.

"It's certainly a time-tested way of coping with really turbulent markets."

Oh cripes! Niall Ferguson - our tenured contrarian indicator - now says gold is a proven defense against investment stress. It's taken 11 years and 356% gains in gold, but he's finally got it.

That's the top. Sell!

Oh, hold on - "A lot of the upside is already there," Ferguson went on, live by video-link to the Wall Street Journal. "The time to buy was in 1999, not 2010..."

Phew! As you were, then, bloody-minded gold buyers. And as you relax, safe in the knowledge that Professor Wrong still says you shouldn't buy, let's remind ourselves just what it was he advised 11 years ago - back in 1999 - the "time to buy gold" as he now puts it...

"The twilight of gold appear[s] to have arrived. True, total blackout is still some way off...Gold has a future, of course.

"But mainly as jewelry."

Fast forward to late 2008 - some $445 higher per ounce for gold, slap-bang amid the post-Lehmans Crash crisis - and Professor Ferguson was at it again.

"I have been debating today whether gold bars really are the answer," Ferguson confessed to the New York Magazine when quizzed about his portfolio for a puff piece that November.

But "they probably aren't," he decided...thereby leaving another $470 per ounce on the table over the last 18 months.

Now he says 2010 is not the time to buy gold either. So, given what happened when he rejected the idea in mid-1999 and then in late 2008, expect another $400-or-so on the price before the Laurence A.Tisch Professor of History next weighs in with his forecast.

The man whose last TV-and-book blockbuster, The Ascent of Money, concluded that "the state-owned bank [was] now close to extinction"...just as the UK nationalized one-third of its finance sector, and the US Fed bought $2 trillion of failing bank assets...now advises that "There are other ways to protect yourself, and maybe somewhat smarter ways."

Missing the point entirely once more, Ferguson recommends - instead of gold - buying Norwegian and Swiss government debt for protection from the sovereign debt crisis.

Clang! Clang! Everybody out!

 

Back to homepage

Leave a comment

Leave a comment