Recently, I’ve been skimming through slide-shows from the various wealth managers giving their “predictions” for 2015. And in almost every one, you get the gold story reappearing. As in: “Will the Gold price recover in 2015?!” I’ve also seen articles of late about some of the European central banks repatriating large parts of their gold reserves.
Almost since Rolling Alpha began (back when it was still on a blogspot domain with a readership of a few kindly friends and family), I have been writing posts about gold and why I dislike it as:
- An investment;
- A medium of exchange;
- A hedge against inflation;
- Money in general.
Posts where I’ve complained:
- Why Buy Gold?! Buy Oil. (from January 2012)
- Gold: The Yays and Nays (from Feb 2013)
- Gold: the Buffett Opinion (from Feb 2013)
- When Prices Fall: The Gold Rout (from April 2013)
- The Petrodollar Wars 101: What was the Gold Standard? (from June 2013)
- The Wonderful and Economic Wizard of Oz (from November 2014)
So because I’m on a bit of an urgent work deadline, I thought I’d direct everyone to some of those posts (I’m a big fan of the Feb 2013 posts – they were fun). And share the infographic below.
And also, point out that there are only 165,000 metric tonnes of above-ground gold in the world. That’s not a lot of gold to go round. Barely a small hill.
According to Credit Suisse, total global wealth in mid-2014 was around $263 trillion. So if you compare that to the $8 trillion of gold figure mentioned in the infographic (at a price that’s well above the current spot price), then you get some perspective on how much value the world ascribes to the yellow metal.
Rolling Alpha posts opinions on finance, economics, and the corporate life in general. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha.
