From Crossing Wall Street:
The Gold Model Revisited
Four years ago, I wrote a post discussing my thoughts on how to build a model for the price of gold. That post received by far the most attention of anything I’ve written. I still get emails about it today.
Over time, I’ve thought more about this issue, and I’ve altered my thinking somewhat. I also want to clarify some points from my original post. Instead of writing an addendum to it, though, I thought it would be clearer to rewrite the whole thing. What follows is the updated version.
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One of the most controversial topics in investing is the price of gold. Fifteen years ago, gold dropped as low as $252 per ounce. The yellow metal then enjoyed a furious rally as it soared above $1,920 per ounce, easily outpacing the major stock-market indexes. Over the last three years, however, it has sunk back down to $1,300.
Like Linus in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, many gold bugs hold out hope. They claim that any day now, gold will resume its march upward to $2,000, then $5,000 and then $10,000 per ounce. But my question is, “How can anyone reasonably calculate what the value of gold is?”
For stocks, we have all sorts of ratios. Sure, those ratios can be off, but at least they’re something. With gold, we have nothing. No assets or liabilities. Not even a dividend. After all, gold is just a rock (OK, OK, an element). How can we even begin to analyze gold’s value? There’s an old joke that the price of gold is understood by exactly two people in the entire world. They both work for the Bank of England, and they disagree.
In this post, I want to put forth a possible model for evaluating the price of gold. The purpose of the model isn’t to say where gold will go but to look at the underlying factors that drive the price of the precious metal. Let me caution you that as with any model, this one has its flaws, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. More importantly, I’ll explain why our model makes theoretical sense, rather than just mashing up numbers and seeing what correlates.
The key to understanding the gold market is understanding that it’s not really about gold at all. Instead, it’s about currencies, and in our case that means the U.S. dollar. Properly understood, gold is really the anti-currency. It serves a valuable purpose in that it keeps all the other currencies honest—or exposes their dishonesty.
This may sound odd, but every major currency has an interest rate tied to it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the euro, the pound or the yen. In essence, that interest rate is what the currency is all about.
Before I get to my model, we need to take a slight detour and discuss a fascinating paradox known as Gibson’s Paradox. This is one the most puzzling topics in economics. Gibson’s Paradox is the observation that interest rates tend to follow the general price level and not the rate of inflation. That’s very strange, because it seems obvious that as inflation rises, interest rates ought to keep up. Similarly, as inflation falls back, rates should move back as well. But historically, that hasn’t been the case. Instead, interest rates have risen as prices have gone up, and only fallen when there’s been deflation.
This paradox has totally baffled economists for years. Yet it really does exist. John Maynard Keynes called it “one of the most completely established empirical facts in the whole field of quantitative economics.” Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz said that “the Gibsonian Paradox remains an empirical phenomenon without a theoretical explanation.”
Even many of today’s prominent economists have tried to tackle Gibson’s Paradox. In 1977, Robert Shiller and Jeremy Siegel wrote a paper on the topic. In 1988 Robert Barsky and none other than Larry Summers took on the paradox in their paper “Gibson’s Paradox and the Gold Standard.” It’s this paper that I want to focus on. (By the way, in this paper the authors thank future econo-bloggers Greg Mankiw and Brad DeLong.)
Summers and Barsky agree that the Gibson Paradox does indeed exist. They also say that it’s not connected with nominal interest rates but with real (meaning after-inflation) interest rates. The catch is that the paradox only works under a gold standard. Absent that standard, the Gibson Paradox fades away....MORE
