• 520 days Will The ECB Continue To Hike Rates?
  • 521 days Forbes: Aramco Remains Largest Company In The Middle East
  • 522 days Caltech Scientists Succesfully Beam Back Solar Power From Space
  • 922 days Could Crypto Overtake Traditional Investment?
  • 927 days Americans Still Quitting Jobs At Record Pace
  • 929 days FinTech Startups Tapping VC Money for ‘Immigrant Banking’
  • 932 days Is The Dollar Too Strong?
  • 932 days Big Tech Disappoints Investors on Earnings Calls
  • 933 days Fear And Celebration On Twitter as Musk Takes The Reins
  • 935 days China Is Quietly Trying To Distance Itself From Russia
  • 935 days Tech and Internet Giants’ Earnings In Focus After Netflix’s Stinker
  • 939 days Crypto Investors Won Big In 2021
  • 939 days The ‘Metaverse’ Economy Could be Worth $13 Trillion By 2030
  • 940 days Food Prices Are Skyrocketing As Putin’s War Persists
  • 942 days Pentagon Resignations Illustrate Our ‘Commercial’ Defense Dilemma
  • 943 days US Banks Shrug off Nearly $15 Billion In Russian Write-Offs
  • 946 days Cannabis Stocks in Holding Pattern Despite Positive Momentum
  • 947 days Is Musk A Bastion Of Free Speech Or Will His Absolutist Stance Backfire?
  • 947 days Two ETFs That Could Hedge Against Extreme Market Volatility
  • 949 days Are NFTs About To Take Over Gaming?
  1. Home
  2. Markets
  3. Other

Gold Thoughts

Much talk about this index or that index making a new high, or near a new high. The level for an index is interesting, but the return being earned is more important. A stock market index could conceivably make a new high each and every day without providing a desirable return. Today's graph compares the return over the past five years of an investment in $Gold and U.S. stocks, as measured by the total return on the S&P 500.  As is readily apparent from that graph, $Gold has substantially outperformed an investment in U.S. equities. Why these results? Gold's price is a mirror reflection of the global purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. As the Federal Reserve has grossly mismanaged U.S. monetary policy over the years, the global forex market has pushed down the value of the dollar. That depreciation of the dollar's value is not reflected in the equity market.

Is this situation like to change? The unwinding of U.S. monetary mismanagement will take some time. The housing & mortgage bubble implosion has much further to go. That bubble represented a massive misallocation of funds, not reversed in just a few months. Additionally, the U.S. economy is slowly moving into the recession necessary to purge the housing & mortgage excesses. The risks for U.S. financial markets are not limited to the aftershocks of the mortgage earthquake. The massive foreign currency mismatch evident in the carry trade loans remains an overhanging danger to financial markets. Borrowing in one currency to invest in risky assets denominated in another currency is a sure way to ultimately destroy wealth. Gold is perhaps the only insurance against the financial agony to come from unwinding of the carry trade loans, and two decades of monetary mismanagement.

 

Back to homepage

Leave a comment

Leave a comment