From his office in Chicago, Donald Coxe heads up the Global Commodity Strategy investment management team, a collaboration of Coxe Advisors and BMO Global Asset Management:
The Gold Report: Are you saying that there's a perception that gold has reached a price ceiling?
Don Coxe: People are wondering where the next price floor is, which is a different type of concern. When gold was moving up, the debate was about how high it might go. Now investors are afraid that gold will collapse. Investors who believed that gold was doomed to collapse back in 2005, 2006 and 2007 were totally destroyed because gold soared to new, all-time peaks. Is gold an animal that has to keep growing or die? I don't believe that, but we have no record of a stock market that's gone up 12 straight years. And if a stock market that had gone up for 12 straight years sagged back by 15%, would it be reasonable to believe that equities are bad investments and we should all move into Treasury bonds?
The Gold Report: Typically, gold was treated as a hedge against inflation and uncertainty. Is it still reasonable to look at it as a hedge?
Don Coxe: It's a hedge against inflation for reasons that in the past we were told were inevitable, but which have not yet happened. You would think that a person who drinks a fifth of whiskey a day and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day is not going to live as long as a normal person. But, suddenly, he is blowing out the candles on his 75 birthday cake. And you say, "This is not medically possible!" It is beating the odds, but at some point, it is going to catch up with the smoker. There simply is no record of huge expansions of the monetary base, huge expansions of government deficits, the inability of politicians to manage and the inability of economies to grow fast and mop it up that don't lead to inflation.
The supply of money relative to the total GDP is now the greatest in human history, and it keeps expanding relative to our actual output. This will lead to inflation. Will it be next year? In five years? Who knows? If you hand out free tickets to a rock concert, you may not drive down the price of the best seats, but if fans believe more than half the seats will be given away at the door, you can bet the promoters will have trouble selling tickets. And that's eventually what's going to happen to paper money.
The Gold Report: Are you saying that there's a perception that gold has reached a price ceiling?
Don Coxe: People are wondering where the next price floor is, which is a different type of concern. When gold was moving up, the debate was about how high it might go. Now investors are afraid that gold will collapse. Investors who believed that gold was doomed to collapse back in 2005, 2006 and 2007 were totally destroyed because gold soared to new, all-time peaks. Is gold an animal that has to keep growing or die? I don't believe that, but we have no record of a stock market that's gone up 12 straight years. And if a stock market that had gone up for 12 straight years sagged back by 15%, would it be reasonable to believe that equities are bad investments and we should all move into Treasury bonds?
The Gold Report: Typically, gold was treated as a hedge against inflation and uncertainty. Is it still reasonable to look at it as a hedge?
Don Coxe: It's a hedge against inflation for reasons that in the past we were told were inevitable, but which have not yet happened. You would think that a person who drinks a fifth of whiskey a day and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day is not going to live as long as a normal person. But, suddenly, he is blowing out the candles on his 75 birthday cake. And you say, "This is not medically possible!" It is beating the odds, but at some point, it is going to catch up with the smoker. There simply is no record of huge expansions of the monetary base, huge expansions of government deficits, the inability of politicians to manage and the inability of economies to grow fast and mop it up that don't lead to inflation.
The supply of money relative to the total GDP is now the greatest in human history, and it keeps expanding relative to our actual output. This will lead to inflation. Will it be next year? In five years? Who knows? If you hand out free tickets to a rock concert, you may not drive down the price of the best seats, but if fans believe more than half the seats will be given away at the door, you can bet the promoters will have trouble selling tickets. And that's eventually what's going to happen to paper money.
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