Skip to main content

How Safe is Gold?

As often happens when the markets are bouncing up and down, some people are turning to the "safe haven" of gold. But how safe is gold?

Gold has several attributes that make it attractive:

1) Gold is durable. In fact, some of the gold you buy today was probably mined by the Inca's thousands of years ago.

2) Gold is universal. With very few exceptions, gold always has value. This is true historically. And no matter where you go today you can likely trade gold for other goods either directly or by converting it into the local currency.

3) Gold is portable. While heavy, gold packs a lot of value in a small package.

4) Gold is beautiful. You can store it as jewelry or other decorative art.

So if you are looking for an investment that will last a 1000's of years and still hold value, gold is a great commodity. Or if you are looking for something that will be likely to survive a complete societal breakdown like a war. However, when you start to look at likely financial conditions in your lifetime, gold's risks start to come into focus.

Because while gold is durable, universal, portable, beautiful, it will not always have the same value. In fact, the price of gold in dollars (or any other currency) is quite volatile. And its value doesn't just change relative to cash, what you can buy with an ounce of gold varies a lot. You might pay $1700 for an ounce of gold today. Perhaps that would make a down payment on a new car. But if the price falls back to where it was 10 years ago, the $280 you get for your ounce of gold won't be much of a down payment. And if you bought an ounce of gold in 1980, you still wouldn't be able to buy as much as it cost you then relative to inflation despite today's high gold prices.

Of course, if you bought GM stock ten years ago you would have done worse, since it would be worthless today.  So the fact that gold goes up and down in value is not fatal.

The difference is that GM lost its value because it stopped being able to produce cars at a profit, couldn't pay its debts and went bankrupt. Gold loses or gains value based solely on changes in how much the people who want to buy it have to pay to find a willing seller.  The gold itself never changes. The gold remains the same durable, beautiful lump.

This is the difference between investment and speculation. Investments are like planting a tree or purchasing fertilizer to make it grow. You expect a return because the investment leads to more production that has value.  Of course the plant might die and you get nothing in return.

Speculation relies on buying low and selling high.  For you to buy low, someone else has to sell low. And to sell high, someone else has to buy high. In the case of stock, the value might have changed based on economic conditions or growth in the company. You are still speculating, but your money is working to make the company more valuable. Its like a mature tree. The company stock is more valuable because the company is more productive. Meanwhile, the gold still remains the same durable, beautiful lump.

So why is gold approaching a record high? Why are people willing to pay more for it now than they were ten years ago? It seems many gold investors believe we have inflation in our future and others are afraid of other investments after having been burned in the stock market and real estate.

In theory, gold can be a hedge against inflation. As the price of other things raise, gold will raise along with them. Unfortunately that theory doesn't really appear to be how gold prices respond. It probably explains part of the price, but it doesn't explain gold's extreme price fluctuations. We have had a run up in the price of gold over the past decade despite low inflation. And gold prices crashed even when inflation was higher than today.

Today's gold price is six times what it was a decade ago. Total inflation over that period has been about 20%, one 30th of that. Assume that the long-term price of gold relative to other goods and services should be the same as it was a decade ago. The cost in dollars of everything else would have to go up to 6 times just to sustain the current price of gold.

Far from being a safe investment. Gold is always a highly volatile, speculative investment. You are hearing the same reassurances from its promoters you heard during the dot.com bubble and the housing bubble. Gold prices don't go up endlessly any more than housing prices do. Right now it looks like the next bubble. And folks who buy high now will end up holding the bag when the bubble pops.

You aren't smarter than the market. It really is that simple.


Comments

Ross Williams said…
Update: In the year since I wrote this article the price of gold has dropped 25%.
Ross Williams said…
Update: The price of gold ended 2012 when I first published this at $1664/oz. The price now is $1267/oz

Popular posts from this blog

Who is to blame for this mess?

There seems to be a lot of discussion to who is to blame for the financial crisis. But an awful lot of the media coverage is highly misleading. Here is synopis: 1) The meltdown in the financial market had little to do with people getting mortgages they couldn't afford. The collapse of the mortgage backed CDO's was caused by the collapse in the value of the houses which provided the collateral. It turned the mortgages behind the "collateralized debt obligations" (CDO's) into mostly un-collateralized debts. The result was that they went from AAA rated bonds to junk. 2)So what caused the housing bubble and collapse? Many people blame the fed, but don't have the story right. The fed did play a role. By keeping interest rates on Treasury Bonds low, they provided a market for alternative bonds that would pay a greater return. But the major cause of the housing bubble was the creativity of the investment banks. These are not the retail banks that make home mortgages ...

The Stock Market hasn't gone up, the Value of the Dollar has Just Gone Down.

You aren't smarter than the market. It really is that simple. The New York Times had an article about the stock market's recent gains. The story noted that while the market had gone up 11% since the election, the dollar had dropped 10% against a basket of foreign currencies during that same period. They described this as "almost a mirror image." Unfortunately it is exactly a mirror image for people who hold those foreign currencies. Lets say they paid a $100 for a share of stock the day of the election and they exchanged 100 units of their own currency for that $100. Now if they sell that stock they will get $111 dollars, but when they exchange that $111 dollars, they will get back 100 units of their own currency. They have earned nothing, in their own local currency's terms the price hasn't changed. In a world investment market, the price of stock is set by what people around the world are willing to pay for it. Most people are still paying the same pr...

Self-Directed Real Estate IRA's the New Scam?

You aren't smarter than the market. It really is that simple. You know the marketing folks have been out talking when the New York Times does a fluff story on some new way to make more money with your investments. So watch out for the new scam promoted by the same media advisers who told you a few years ago to buy the most expensive house a lender would finance. Paul Sullivan story is about people'e successful investment of their retirement money in real estate using a self-directed IRA. He provides us with several "success stories".  Of course they are all recent converters to this idea and, not surprising, all but one of the people whose story Sullivan tells are also in real estate sales. The problem isn't really Paul Sullivan. Its that there is no one who makes money by digging out the horror stories from people who invested their retirement funds in real estate at the height of the housing bubble. There aren't any public relations firms devoted to de...