Not really ten reasons, but one step at a time.
- So the US economy is crapping out. Big deal? Yes sir, very big deal. Dollar hits big time lows. What happens then?
- Look, a lot of us Asian Economies including the guys who have lots of oil and desert, have our bloody reserves in dollars. Ok?
- And if you flush the dollar down the toilet like the US is most likely to do with some grand slam rescue attempts to save some lousy bond insurers, we Asian Economies don't know what the frick to do with our reserves.
- Oh you small little Asian Economies you say!Dude, our RESERVES are already fat. This is a huge deal, a few trillion dollars. China has some 1.5 trillion, Saudi Arabia has about 800 bn, and with Korea, Singapore, India etc. Don't even count Japan.
- So what reserve currency if not the dollar? Uhm, the Euro? No thank you, you guys are even more clueless and more divided in a recession than we can trust. The pound sterling? Not very different from the dollar, and now we can't understand the accent either, depending on which part of the UK you're talking about.
- So we'll set up sovereign funds, maybe. But what are we going to buy? The US won't let us touch defense etc. or even big telcos, and these are the only things worth buying in a recession. At least on the scale these funds want to think about.
- Latin America, yes. Now good place for sovereign funds to invest. Unfortunately, we are also clueless out here and can't figure out Portugese or Spanish, so we will give that a miss, regardless of how good the investment might be.
- That leaves precious METALS. We had a gold reserve earlier but it's gone now, but gold is still worth it. But which bugger will go buy at this obscene price? Answer: Everyone. They're all waiting for someone to jump in and then everyone's in.
- When these guys talk some gazillion trillion dollars, gold is likely to jump up a little bit. And when it goes too high it's likely to get some regulatory interest (like saying "we'll control the price of gold") which will again cause it to shoot through the roof because that's how the market works.
- If the world works like I said, someone who bought gold now would still make a lot of money.
So considering Gold (either in physical form or as an Exchange Traded Fund) as an investment is a viable option!!!!!
