Alasdair Macleod: All Roads in Europe Lead to Gold

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/alasdair-macleod-all-roads-europe-lead-gold/75724

On Gold

People who have gold or silver, I think actually had a very rough ride over the last couple of months. A lot of them are wondering what on Earth is going on because every time you get good news, gold seems to rally along with equities, but every time there’s bad news and gold actually should be giving you some protection, it goes down the swanny.

I think the problem there is that the whole system is run by people who went to college and were taught keynesian economics. In my day, when I first went into the stock market and I enjoyed that first bull market in gold when it went from thirty-five bucks to eight-fifty, the traders and investment managers were all practical people. They all cut their teeth, all learned their trade the hard way. Some of them had degrees in college, but generally it would have been something like classics or history or something like that. If they got a degree in economics, they probably would have left because they never would have understood it in those days. But now it has changed. Everybody who is employed has a degree and if they are anything to do with investment strategy, or the investment business, it is all economics degrees. So they have been brainwashed in the keynesian thing. This sort of neoclassical approach where gold is yesterday’s story, paper money is the future. They really do believe it and it is the opinions of these people who drive the markets in the short term.

The result is that gold and silver have become very, very seriously mispriced. I don’t think I have seen a stretch like this as I can remember; by stretch, the difference between perhaps where it should be. We must be careful not to tell the market what the price should be, but it is so underpriced at a time of enormous systemic stress, that I think when gold and silver snap back into a more sensible, logical valuation relationship with the markets, the move actually could be very, very sharp and quite large. If gold ran up through the $2,000 level very quickly, which I think is a very strong possibility, because it is been held down so much, that could bring other problems. The central banks, who might have sold gold and not told us about it will find that they are embarrassed. I think also the bullion banks in London who operate a fractional reserve system with gold, exactly the same way as to do with any paper currency, will be hurt very, very badly on the run. Any shorts in the futures market equally could be hurt very, very badly. We have a situation, where there is a potential for a huge run in gold and I personally wouldn’t be surprised to see it. - Alasdair MacLeod