Gold and the dollar devaluation

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Paranoid theories can’t take the shine off gold

Paranoid theories can’t take the shine off gold

By John Dizard

Published: October 9 2009 20:21 | Last updated: October 9 2009 20:21

They asked me to write about the goldbugs’ point of view, including the paranoia and conspiracy theories about gold. You know. “Them”. The request could have come in any number of ways: a note composed from cut-up newspaper headlines, or a “suggestion” from a muffled voice over the phone. In this case, it was an “FT editor”. I can only speculate about his true identity.

If you immerse yourself in the world of goldbuggery, the nothing-is-what-it-seems worldview can become that infectious. The paranoia of the goldbugs, die-hard believers in the value of the metal, has been with us a long time, intensifying since the collapse of the last great gold bull market in the early 1980s. Now, though, the goldbugs’ resolute disbelief in the legitimacy and value of official currencies is influencing mainstream market opinion, helped by this week’s record price of $1,061 per Troy ounce.

The fundamental premise of goldbug conspiracy theory is that the metal would have continued to hold and even increase its value over the years against the “fiat” currencies if there had not been a sustained, secret intervention on the part of some powerful group of market manipulators. The speculated-upon identity of the “Hand”, or “Seller”, or “Manager” varied over the years, from JPMorgan, the US Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs (of course), to miner Barrick Gold or George Soros.

Underlying all the conspiracy theories are two convictions: gold is the only true measure of value, and the people in charge share the goldbugs’ belief in the centrality of the gold market in the organisation of the economic and financial world.

The first premise has both a material and a religious aspect. In the material world, gold’s chemical stability, rarity and ductility have in all societies made it a precious asset. However, that very scarcity and weight, along with the need to re-assay gold offered as payment, limit its usefulness as a medium of exchange for a world with today’s volume of trade. While it is a useful, and, over the longest term, essential, store of monetary value, there is a limit to the degree to which it can substitute for paper or electronic currencies.

The utility of gold as a store of value can, for the obsessive, verge on religious devotion, or even love, despite the Bible’s admonition that “the love of money is the root of all evil”. A true goldbug would probably say this applies only to the government’s money.

The second premise, that the committee or committees which run the economy do so through their setting of the gold price, had some basis in truth when governments or central banks were willing to buy and sell gold to set their currency’s exchange rates. The US government’s willingness to do that with the public ended in 1933, and its sales of gold to official counterparties ended in 1971.

For a few years after the 1971 “closing of the gold window”, the end of US government gold sales, there was residual interest in foreign governments’ valuation of their gold reserves. A website popular with goldbugs, Zero Hedge, recently revealed a 1975 Federal Reserve memorandum to President Gerald Ford, in which an argument between the Treasury and the Fed is outlined. Zero Hedge describes the memo as a “smoking gun”, and goes on to say: “So to all conspiracy theorists claiming that gold is being manipulated on a daily basis by the Federal Reserve: when it occurs over and over, and is so well documented, it is no longer a theory.”

The memo itself is rather less dramatic and has nothing to do with manipulation on a daily basis. Essentially, the Fed chairman, then Arthur Burns, was telling Mr Ford that if the French buy lots of gold it will lead to an increase in world liquidity and more inflation. As usual, Mr Burns was wrong. Gold was not necessary to inflate or deflate world liquidity; that could be done through money market operations by government currency issuers, including the French and the Americans.

Gold could move the larger financial world directly if central banks tied the level and rate of currency issuance directly to their gold reserves or to the metal’s price. Central banks, or a shadowy Doctor Evil, do not need to manipulate the price of gold if the price does not limit their freedom of action. What matters to governments is their ability to finance themselves through bond sales. This would be hampered if the bonds’ value was being eroded by higher inflation, or by devaluation of the currency relative to other currencies.

And that is what the gold price is beginning to tell us. The investing public may be too worried about imminent inflation; more likely, given the continued weakness in employment and wages, not to mention housing, we will have weak dollar-measured general price inflation. However, in spite of mantra-like official statements to the contrary, it would seem that the US government wants to competitively devalue its way to national prosperity.

That hasn’t worked yet, since the trade-weighted dollar is about where it was at the beginning of the crisis, but I am confident that if a government wants to debase its currency, it can ultimately succeed in doing so.

One of the advantages of being a goldbug now, or becoming one soon, is that it is one commodity whose price is not likely to be manipulated below its market-equilibrium level by the US government (“Them”, if you prefer). There will be attempts to limit speculation in such essential commodities as oil, grains, or base metals, but a gold price rise would simply represent a successful devaluation.

So while the goldbugs’ conspiracy theories are chimerical, their investment strategy is at last aligning with that of the real world.

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