Gold Is Down But Not Out
Doug Eberhardt | Jun 14, 2015 12:16AM ET
Gold had a range of $10 on Friday, closing down slightly in the middle of that range at a bid of $1,181.30. Silver has been acting weaker than gold the last 30 days, 6.34% lower while gold is down 2.78%. Over the past year, silver is down 18.28% while gold is lower by 7.21%. This is not what investors in gold and silver want to see.
Meanwhile, over the past year, the dollar is up 17.75%.
If you think about it, lovers of gold, your dollars should have bought you 17.75% more today versus a year ago. Conversely, if you bought gold a year ago, you are down 7.21% on that investment. But all is not negative, because your purchasing power went up because gold is priced in dollars.
You could have bought oil with your dollars a year ago for $95 a barrel. Today you can buy oil for $59 a barrel.
A year ago gold was $1,273 an ounce and could have bought you 13.4 barrels of gold. If you exchanged that ounce of gold, today worth $1,181.30 (dollars), you could buy 20 barrels of oil. Has gold been a bad investment if you were in the market for oil? Of course not. It held its purchasing power.
The same would be true for natural gas, grains, copper, and many other commodities. In fact, gold has held up quite well over the last year as far as its purchasing power compared to other commodities.
But what do you see reversing this downtrend in the price of gold? If the dollar keeps moving higher, do you see the price of gold falling more? I do. But for those who are contemplating adding gold to their portfolio, keep in mind there is a difference between the dollar price of gold and the purchasing power of gold.
Yes, if you kept your money in dollars instead of gold the last year you could have bought a little more oil. But you also have to recognize trends. And the trend right now is gold down and dollar up.
There is also the very good reason to own gold as insurance against unforeseen financial and economic issues that may arise. Once gold bottoms however, the idea of buying gold as insurance may become even more prevalent; However, your average investor today only sees stocks or bonds as the place to be.
Friday wasn’t so good for stocks and I have been leaning short term negative on the stock market only because I don’t believe the Greece situation is close to being resolved. And now neither does the IMF which is supposed to be paid by Greece as they are pulling out of talks . Ouch! The Dow fell 140 points on this news.
We may get some continuation of Friday's stock selling on Monday. Gold mining stocks overall fell with the stock market.
I said in my Current Thoughts earlier in June: we may be topping in the U.S. 10-Year Treasury and it seems this may be the case. It also fits in with my thinking we may be entering a deflationary bout for a bit.
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This coming week we have another Fed meeting. What’s on their collective minds? While there won’t be a move to raise interest rates at this point in time, they may very well take the retail news and once again, “talk the talk” that they may raise rates in September. Too bad the good retail news was buoyed only by sub-prime auto lending boosting auto sales. In other words, without this allowance of less than credit-worthy buyers of cars to boost auto sales, the retail report wouldn’t have been so good.
How is it the Fed doesn’t read the data the same way that I read it? As usual they will be behind the curve on anything that is needed to help the economy along. It’s been almost a year now since CNBC folks started talking about the recovering economy and asking when will the Fed raise interest rates. During the last year I said the Fed may do a token raise of rates to keep the blind faithful glued to their every move and keep the perception that they know what they are doing (aka credibility intact).
We may finally get that move to raise rates during the September meeting. If we do, it will be the last move higher and from that point forward we should see a move towards more QE as the Fed is exposed as to not having a clue of what’s really going on. Before this next round of QE we should see more signs of a recession and more talk of deflation. This will lead to more unprecedented Fed action to selfishly make sure their game continues as they can’t have deflation.
In fact, one must consider also that the Fed is not in this alone. The ECB, BofJ and BofE are also playing this game and experiencing their own issues. The inter-connectivity of everything will become more apparent when you see some institution, probably in Europe or the UK, succumb to a bad bet or some re-hypothecation issue and things maybe snowball from there. Yes, that’s right, derivatives are still an issue, here and abroad. Especially abroad. Why else would they extend the Volcker Rule to 2017? It’s to give banks in other countries more time to get their acts together because of the inter-connectivity with all other banks and financial institutions.
Here in the U.S. though, all is perceived as fine in the financial world. No one is fearful of a repeat of the 2009 financial crisis. The Dodd Frank Act saved us from any future crisis. AIG, which re-branded itself as Chartis after the crisis, changed its name back to AIG. Bank balance sheets are doing well again thanks to the Fed. What could possibly go wrong?
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