Gold Is the Number One Hedge Against a Falling Dollar.



Posted: Saturday, June 14, 2008

by Gavin Conway

Gold is the chaos hedging premier monetary asset of the world. As geopolitical tensions, war, financial turmoil, geopolitial tension or virtually and global unrest manifests, gold responds directly. We will see gold rise higher in the future as the US and the global community keep spending too much. Too much much is being requested by banks and printed by the Federal Reserve and many other factors like a weakening Dollar, tensions internationally like the Middle East and also China and India's furiously growing economies effect directly the price of gold.

If you watch the markets then you will see that gold, silver, oil, commodities and other tangible assets tend to rise together, they're contra-cyclical to paper financial assets for 2/3 of a cycle. When stocks are doing well, then gold prices don't move and when stocks are flat to negative on their rate of return in other asset classes, gold performs very well. People tend to step back from other financial assets and say, until the risk reward relationship is fair and even, I'd rather protect than speculate. That's why, for 2/3 of the business cycle it is contra-cyclical.

Gold rose roughly 158% in the last six years, silver went up about 246% and while the Dollar fell 32%, up went gold stock by 300%. Compair the the Dollar today to the Dollar in 1870 and it is only worth 1cent and compaired to the Dollar in 1919 it is only worth 2cent and the largest drop in the Dollar, since it has been unhinged from gold, has been since the 1970's. There has been a long term decline of the Dollar since the birth of the Federal Reserve in 1913, ending over 100 years of Dollar price stability. The US is now running a total annual budget and trade deficits exceeding $1.5trillion Dollars and the Federal Reserve is creating annually $1-2 trillion Dollar liquidity out of nothing which has a massive effect on things like the DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE, the DOWN JONES TRANSPORTATION AVERAGE and the DOW JONES UTILITY AVERAGE which have all been moving well since 2001 -2002 however, when you divide their price performance by the gold price, which I beieve is real money, you have downward trends in all three averages of the DOW JONES.

So here we have it, US debt has grown 5.5 times, roughly, since 1980 from $8 trillion to $44 trillion which is the biggest debt explosion in world history.

How do we deal with this massive debt? One way to pay it off is to raise taxes. WE have seen that before and we will see it in the years to come. They can print money as in Weimar Republic Germany after World War II. They could sell off by privatizing National assets such as telecommunications, transport, water systems or real estate. Just as Russia rejected $110 billion, so could they reject the debt. Finally, they could simply resort to plunder by launching wars to acquire wealth such as the Roman Empire did, the Spanish Empire did, the Nazis did and the Japanese.

Large Dollar holders are now beginning to exit the Dollar since the latest decline. The Dollar became the world's reserve currency in 1944, everything had to be related to Dollars, most international transactions were denominated by the US Dollar for the next 62 years giving America huge financial power economically and politically. The United Arab Emirates announced that it would cut its Dollar holding in half in October 2006 and Japanese life insurers with $1.6 trillion in managed assets announced they were to diversify out of their Dollar holdings. Central banks all across Asia (South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong) have all started to diversify out of Dollars. China with $1trillion in foreign currency reserves has begun to diversify out of its $700billion and to cut back on its purchases of U.S. Treasuries. Russia too has cut its Dollar holdings from 70% to 40%; Sweden cut its Dollor reserves from 37% to 20% and Italy cut theirs by 21%. China is pushing the world to rely less upon the Dollar for world trade.

If foreign banks holding roughly $2.94trillion of U.S. Dollars were to diversify even 10% of their assets, you'd see $294 billion dumped into the market. 20% diversification would make $588 billion thrown out there which has a very negative effect on the Dollars value and of course interest rates would rise.

Foreign commercial institutions like insurance companies, banks, hedge and pension funds hold between $7-8 trillion in U.S. Dollars. Again any diversification away from the Dollar will have the same effect of rising interest rates and inflation through the roof. The Euro is now taking the place of the Dollar, many of the world's oil transactions have begun to be made in Euros. In mid 2006, the IMF director for the Middle East and Central Asia urged Persian Gulf countries to peg their currencies to the Euro instead of the Dollar. Worldwide the Euro is in greater circulation than the Dollar and so it is large enough to enable it to become the reserve currency of the world. Foreign Dollar holders are now switching to Euros, British pounds, Swiss Francs and other strong currencies, into gold and other commodities such as oil and minerals.

So as the Dollar collapses, gold has risen. They tend to move in the opposite direction if they aren't attached. Over the last 36years, the US Dollar has declined 80%, while gold has risen 1900%. Today it takes five times more of the Dollar to buy the same amount of goods or services than in 1971.

In the end we can see that against a depreciating Dollar, gold is the perfect hedge.

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As the Dollar is falling, now is the best time to move toward gold, silver or platinum to secure your future. You can start first by visiting my web site at http://www.wheretobuy-gold.com and to my blog at http://howtobuy-gold.blogspot.com/
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by JL
from US
3 years 317 days ago.
I have heard a lot about gold in the economy lately. Thanks for explaining it so well.
» left by Gavin from Dublin 3 years 316 days ago.
Your welcome, its a topic that I too had been hearing a lot about and so researched into and with the information I came arcoss I realised it needed an audience with the public...
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