Gold is everywhere at the moment. I’ve just been reading a piece on the BBC website about ‘tupperware’-style parties in California’s well-to-do Orange County area. Except here the women aren’t lining up to be sold plastic food containers – they’re having a little get-together to sell off their unwanted gold jewellery.
Apparently, the buyer pays 60% of the spot price, then sells the gold in bulk to a refinery for 95% of the going rate. And the women have the chance to ditch embarrassing jewellery or unwanted presents from ex-boyfriends. What do they do with the money? Well, this is Orange County, so it’s not being spent on the gas bill – “many say they will spend the money they realise on treats – a piece of art they couldn’t otherwise justify or a meal for the family”.
Of course, we’re big fans of gold here at MoneyWeek. But we also realise the value of contrarian investing. When you see things like ‘gold parties’ being reported on the BBC, and whole new sections on investing in gold being set up on the websites of national newspapers, then it’s easy to start wondering if the best days have come and gone for the yellow metal. Indeed, our regular commodities writer, Dominic Frisby (you can read Dominic every Wednesday in our free daily email, Money Morning), recently suggested when gold hit the $1,000 an ounce mark that readers might want to take some profits if they were the trading types.
But the last thing that Dominic or I would suggest is that you sell your physical gold. The rising price may have drawn a lot of attention, but that doesn’t mean the party’s over for gold. You just have to look at what’s happening in the world. Our cover story this week talks about the problems afflicting Europe and the eurozone. Meanwhile, Britain is officially embarking on quantitative easing – printing money, to you and me – and pumping yet more money into the banks. As for America – if the stimulus packages weren’t money enough, the financial sector there seems to have created its very own black hole in the form of giant insurer AIG, which gobbled up another $30bn this week as it made the biggest corporate loss in history.
By the time this financial crisis is over, the world will be awash with meaningless paper money. Judging by how they’ve coped with this phase of the crisis, I don’t rate politicians’ chances of dealing with the inflationary boom that’ll follow as a consequence. I suspect the ladies of Orange County will be wishing they’d held onto their ear-rings rather than swapping them for a night out. Gold might well correct from here, but don’t queue up to flog off your fillings just yet.