GATA's longtime friend, financial newsletter writer Thom Calandra, yesterday asked your secretary/treasurer if a gold mania was developing. My comments made his letter this morning, and he doesn't mind if I share them with you, so they're appended.
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Where and when does the gold price stop rising?
It would seem to depend on a few things.
What is the remaining naked short position in gold incurred by the derivatives that were instigated or backstopped by the U.S. government? What would be the monetary and institutional cost of defaulting on them through force majeure?
How much more gold will governments want to acquire to strike a better balance between their "fiat" and hard assets? There is speculation that China may be close to what it considers an optimum balance, having acquired thousands of tonnes of unreported gold, but most nations probably wish they had more.
How much do the new gold-centric powers want to weaken the United States and its allies financially, strategically, and as trading partners?
Will retail investors come to understand the difference between real metal and "paper gold"? If they do come to understand, they'll want more of the former and less of the latter. I don't yet sense much appreciation for gold among retail investors in the United States, but there is much appreciation for it among retail investors in Asia and a growing amount in Europe.
Will governments, especially in the West, try to interfere with the private ownership of gold?
Will peace be restored between Russia and Ukraine, and will the Russian foreign exchange reserves be returned, or will they be formally expropriated and spent, destroying what's left of trust among nations in reserves held abroad?
How much more money creation will governments undertake to inflate away their unsupportable debt and avert a deflationary depression?
The United States and its closest allies worked together for decades to suppress and restrain the gold price precisely because they realized that if the monetary metal ever escaped their clutches and regained proper respect as the ultimate form of money, it would either impose unbearable discipline on welfare states or wreak devastation on government currencies. The price-suppression scheme could work only if all other major central banks were unaware of it or, if aware, they went along with it. The Mozhaiskov speech in Moscow in 2004 --
https://www.gata.org/node/11723
-- and the U.S. State Department cables from Beijing, exposed by Wikileaks in 2011 --
http://www.gata.org/node/10380
http://www.gata.org/node/10416
-- showed that Russia and China had discovered the racket and were likely to strive to bust it up.
Russia, China, and their allies now are large enough forces economically and politically that they probably can put the gold price and its reciprocal, the dollar, anywhere they want to put them.
So better to ask them how high gold is going, not me. But given the factors cited above, I'd be surprised if gold wasn't a lot higher over the next few months and years.
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