◆ “We remain in love with gold – especially in times of uncertainty.”
◆ With the pandemic and global lockdowns, “interest in gold has soared, driving its price to historic highs.”
◆ Even Buffett seems to have softened his longstanding antipathy, with Berkshire Hathaway acquiring a massive US$565 million stake in the world’s second-largest gold miner, Barrick Gold Corporation.
“Gold,” said famed investor Warren Buffett in 1998, “gets dug out of the ground in Africa or someplace, then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it.
“It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”
Yet for all that, we remain in love with gold – especially in times of uncertainty. With the COVID-19 crisis, interest in gold has soared, driving its price to historic highs (eclipsing its past record set back in August 2011).
Even Buffett seems to have softened his longstanding antipathy, with his company Berkshire Hathaway acquiring a US$565 million stake in the world’s second-largest gold miner, Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation.
Owning shares in a gold-mining company, though, is not the same thing as owning actual gold. Since gold shares are linked both to gold prices and to the broader share market, they tend to move with the market when it falls sharply.
That deprives gold shares of a key feature of gold bullion – its safe haven property.
SAFE HAVEN ASSETS
A safe haven is an asset that holds its value in extreme, unexpected events.
It is different from a “safe asset” that provides a guaranteed return, such as government bonds. In buying such a bond you effectively lend money to the government in return for a promise it will repay that money (with interest) in the future.
Safe assets, in other words, are “fixed income” assets, and their prices are relatively stable.
The price of a safe haven asset, on the other hand, will fluctuate, rising in periods of heightened uncertainty, when other investments suffer extreme losses, but may also fall when the uncertainty reverts to more normal levels.
We can see this in the price of gold over the past two decades, both in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis beginning in 2008 and now with the COVID-19 crisis.
The only deviation from gold’s traditional role as a safe haven asset was a price fall over March, as global stock markets crashed. This deviation underlines the uncertainty that gripped investors that month, with some gold owners presumably selling bullion to cover losses or to increase cash holdings.
THE GOLD STANDARD
So why is gold a safe haven?
The simple answer is that it has worked in the past. Based on past experience in a crisis, people believe in the safe haven feature of gold and it works because they believe in it.
Gold has been used since ancient times as a store of value. Helping it achieve this status is its aesthetic appeal, malleability (with a relatively low melting point making it easy to produce coins or jewellery), virtual indestructibility (almost all the gold that has ever been found or mined is still around) and, most importantly, rarity.
Though hundreds of thousands have dug and panned for it over history, the amount of gold mined has never been enough to devalue it.
Because of these features, gold became the basis for money and played a formal monetary role during the gold standard, which required nations to hold gold reserves as a backing of their currency.
Central banks still hold huge gold reserves. Of 197,576 tonnes of gold mined throughout history, the World Gold Council says 17.2 per cent is held (as bullion or coins) by governments and central banks, 21.6 per cent by private investors, about 47 per cent as jewellery, and 14.2 per cent has gone to other uses (such as in electronics).
So while gold, silver, palladium and platinum are all “precious metals” the latter three are not commonly accepted safe havens because they played a different monetary and investment role in the past.
Dirk Baur is Professor of Finance at the University of Western Australia Business School. Allan Trench is Professor and MBA Director at the University of Western Australia Business School. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
Full Article via Channel News Asia Here
See also ‘Oracle’ Buffett, Africa and Martians: “Is Gold Worth Anything At All?” and Buffett Sees Market Crash Coming? His Cash Speaks Louder Than Words
NEWS and COMMENTARY
Gold futures settle at highest in 2 weeks (MarketWatch)
Dow jumps as Wall Street builds on Monday’s comeback (CNBC)
Gold gains as dollar softens ahead of Fed meeting (Reuters)
World’s Biggest Gold ETF Halts Record Run as Haven Demand Ebbs (Bloomberg)
Fed nominee Shelton doesn’t yet have Senate support (Reuters)
Will slowing investor demand loom over gold prices? (Reuters)
GOLD PRICES (USD, GBP & EUR – AM/ PM LBMA Fix)
14-Sep-20 1942.30 1958.70 1511.69 1518.97 1638.14 1648.83
11-Sep-20 1944.50 1947.40 1519.82 1523.06 1639.41 1644.38
10-Sep-20 1944.80 1966.25 1493.41 1519.71 1643.74 1651.26
09-Sep-20 1928.40 1947.20 1489.69 1496.62 1638.56 1647.14
08-Sep-20 1920.60 1910.95 1467.72 1466.27 1626.17 1622.40
07-Sep-20 1928.40 1928.45 1463.08 1465.43 1629.88 1631.47
04-Sep-20 1937.60 1926.30 1456.49 1459.56 1634.75 1633.12
03-Sep-20 1934.10 1940.45 1453.86 1459.99 1635.28 1637.74
02-Sep-20 1969.00 1947.05 1475.17 1462.43 1659.47 1645.45
01-Sep-20 1987.95 1972.35 1479.83 1469.60 1661.33 1651.45
28-Aug-20 1955.85 1957.35 1471.97 1472.91 1642.72 1647.31
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