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The Economist and Gold

Gold, scarcity and the "industrially useless" fallacy...

In THE ECONOMIST last week Nils Sandberg from Cambridge University's Judge Business School presented a common argument against gold's current value, which according to him is in bubble territory because gold has few industrial uses.

Disproving his thesis is childishly simple, writes Paul Tustain, founder & CEO of BullionVault.

Take one twenty pound note out of your wallet. Consider the industrial applications of the paper it is printed on. Now burn it.

Well, why didn't you? After all, its value – according to Mr Sandberg's thesis – rests on the paper's usefulness in industrial processes.

Nevertheless it's still interesting to understand why gold – like twenty pound notes – is valued above its manufacturing relevance. Unsurprisingly the answer lies in marginal utility.

Gold offers humanity one exceptionally useful property; it has an extraordinarily stable stock. There are 166,000 tonnes of the stuff above ground (worth about 8 trillion dollars) of which about 88% is held as a value store of sorts, in jewellery (52%) and bullion (36%). The stock is growing by about 1.5% a year, from the combined efforts of all the world's miners.

It is because gold is each of:

  1. geologically rare;
  2. elemental (i.e. incapable of being manufactured); and
  3. industrially useless,

that it has this reliable stock quantity. Nothing else can do it; not silver, which is 80 times more common in the ground, nor platinum, which is far too useful as a catalyst to offer stock stability.

Reliable scarcity is the key property savers require of money, which otherwise fails to store value. But of course we don't need gold to deliver reliable scarcity, we can usually create that reliable scarcity artificially, as we do with our modern currencies.

Now the marginal utility explanation. When new currency is too freely issued reliable scarcity becomes under-supplied, and savers go in search of it. Having seen artificial reliable scarcity fail in one currency, the promise of it in another is unconvincing, so they turn to natural reliable scarcity, and demand for it increases dramatically as governments print money. This is what drives gold up. Mr Sandberg is right though, that it will eventually go down again, when currencies' artificial scarcity once more becomes reliable, and when those currencies start to generate a yield.

But in the meantime it looks irrationally optimistic to hope that the US government faced with a 21 trillion dollar debt will not print more and more money.

The question, therefore, is whether the savers who own 100 trillion dollars of dated debt instruments in the bond markets will take fright at continuing money printing policies of the US and other governments. That 100 trillion of dated debt has already started running down the clock. It is shifting to the short end, where it behaves more and more like cash. Maybe its holders will demand cash (as is their right) at its redemption. The sums involved would swamp the 15 trillion dollars of cash and near term deposit instruments currently in issue.

People who own gold are increasingly aware of this possibility. We don't know whether the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen and the Pound (all of which have started a debt market drift to the short end) will ultimately go into the currency death spiral. We are just mindful that it is the usual destiny of currencies driven by political expedience toward the printing press. It looks like a possibility at least.

To finish with here's the brainteaser which the Chinese are currently wrestling with. Now that you know the US debt profile is slowly shifting to the short end, and represents about 6 times the currency in issue, you are required to choose today something to own in 8 years time. What would you rather have, a tenth of the US Treasury's paper bond debts, or five times its very large gold reserve? At current market prices these two are worth about the same.

By the way, in the intervening 8 years the US government has budgeted to issue 8 trillion net of its own bonds, representing an increase in the stock of 57%. A further 1 trillion of gold will be mined worldwide, an increase in the stock of 12%.

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Paul Tustain is the founder and chairman of BullionVault.

See the full archive of Paul Tustain articles.
 

Please Note: All articles published here are to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it. Please review our Terms & Conditions for accessing Gold News.

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