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The Economist on the Gold Bubble
I know that a number of my friends are periodically curious about the whole Gold thing: whether it's a decent investment, whether they should be buying it or selling it, and so on. This article in the Economist a couple of weeks ago does a better job of probing the details than I could; if you're interested, I recommend reading it.
My take: gold is currently over-priced, and I expect the bubble to at least deflate, if not actively pop, over the next year, so I'd probably sell if I had any. Once the price *does* sink a good ways, it may be worth at least thinking about buying, if and only if you think that inflation will become a serious problem for the US.
(At this point, the evidence of that is weak at best: all the signs are that deflation is a much more serious and immediate problem, which is why most economists with a clue are poo-pooh'ing the overheated worries about government spending. But if the economy recovers *and* the government doesn't *then* rein in spending aggressively, there's a high likelihood of inflation afterwards. At that point, gold becomes a likely-good investment -- not for any reason that makes any sense, but simply due to the mass psychology that says that gold is a good inflation hedge. This is mostly silly -- gold has little intrinsic value, so there's no good reason for it to be good against inflation -- but going with the herd is typically a fine way to make money, so long as you're *ahead* of the herd instead of behind it...)
My take: gold is currently over-priced, and I expect the bubble to at least deflate, if not actively pop, over the next year, so I'd probably sell if I had any. Once the price *does* sink a good ways, it may be worth at least thinking about buying, if and only if you think that inflation will become a serious problem for the US.
(At this point, the evidence of that is weak at best: all the signs are that deflation is a much more serious and immediate problem, which is why most economists with a clue are poo-pooh'ing the overheated worries about government spending. But if the economy recovers *and* the government doesn't *then* rein in spending aggressively, there's a high likelihood of inflation afterwards. At that point, gold becomes a likely-good investment -- not for any reason that makes any sense, but simply due to the mass psychology that says that gold is a good inflation hedge. This is mostly silly -- gold has little intrinsic value, so there's no good reason for it to be good against inflation -- but going with the herd is typically a fine way to make money, so long as you're *ahead* of the herd instead of behind it...)