Gold was the Best Investment since 2000, says BMO Financial exec

"There are many serious reasons why I like gold, but one very important reason has to do with the shift in the share of world gross domestic product away from the highly industrialized nations toward emerging economies in Asia," Don Coxe of BMO Financial tells The Gold Report in a new interview. 

"For thousands of years, people in China and in India have respected gold. The Western countries, on the other hand, were captivated some decades ago by economists who claimed that gold had become irrelevant as money. But the Chinese and Indian people hoard gold as a store of value and trade it as a treasured commodity. ...

"Consider an art auction. If a bidder who 10 years ago only bought one painting suddenly buys 50 paintings, that bidder will greatly influence subsequent bids for the art. In China and India there are suddenly many more wealthy people than they've had for millennia. In a culture that values gold, newly rich middle class people will buy the yellow metal not only for personal adornment, but also as a form of savings that is safer than paper money. ...

"The Indians are the biggest consumers of gold in the world. The Chinese are moving up fast, though. Plus, there are simply more rich people in the world. Hundreds of millions of people now have some form of savings. The best single investment anyone could have made, since the year 2000 -- apart from buying Apple stock -- was in gold. It has gone from $300/oz to $1,650/oz. It's gone up every year, including this year. So every year in this millennium the price of gold has gone up. ...

"Probably the only commodity that can benefit from the euro meltdown is gold, because the euro is the first currency ever to be backed by no government, no tax system, no army and no navy. It is backed only by a theory and a set of rules, and the people behind it have violated the theory and the rules. I doubt there is any intrinsic value behind the euro. But take the exact opposite extreme from the euro and go to something that's been a store of value for as long as there has been civilization, gold. ...

"One of the biggest arguments used against gold is that gold does not pay any interest. The monetarists said you might as well keep your money in a bank account. OK, so now that we are getting zero interest on short-term deposits, the single biggest argument against owning gold is gone. As an asset class, gold has gone up every year of this millennium, and it seems to me that investing in gold makes much more sense than holding on to a lot of idle cash." 

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