Is $6,300 fair value for gold?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
London Telegraph
Thursday, Nov 19th, 2009

The last parabolic spike in gold took off when central banks joined the fray in the 1970s, hoarding bullion with the same enthusiasm as gold bugs.

Dylan Grice from Société Générale says it smells much the same today.

He sees an eery similarity between the decision of India’s central bank to buy half the IMF’s entire sale of gold, and the move by France’s central bank to start converting dollars into gold in 1965 — which was, of course, the start of the slippery slope leading to the collapse of Bretton Woods and the closure of the US gold window under Nixon.

In the gold mania that followed, the price rose to levels that matched the US dollar monetary base (it reached 140pc at the peak). If that were to occur today after Ben Bernanke’s go at the printing press, gold would have to reach $6,300 an ounce. The US owns 263m ounces of gold while the Fed’s monetary base is $1.7 trillion. Simple equation.

Gold has had its ups and downs, of course. It is trading today at roughly the same real price as in the mid-13th Century — when an ounce bought a light suit of chain mail.

Full article here

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