Friday, May 14, 2010

The World Debts and Gold

A lot of people have asked me over the years as to why one should buy gold and not hold liquid cash. I will in this post explain the reason why one should be doing that. The two common questions why would one buy gold and the second is how you buy gold.


I will start with the world’s largest economy and our trusted world’s so called reserve currency, The US dollar. An article once published by an author I don’t remember currently is that every second the US government spends $16,000 more than it raises in taxes. So if you do the normal math


1 debt second = US $ 16,000
1 debt year = $500,000,000,000


These figures are just the budget deficit. Now if you understand economics, there are other deficits like the trade deficit which is worse than the budget deficit itself. It grows as Americans buy consumer goods and export dollars. Not so many foreigners buy American goods but widely believe that US produces the best money. That is why it is dollars which are being exported all over the world.


This will only last for a few years, when you can buy anything in the world on the cheap because all anyone wants is your money or your notes, to act as a better store of value than their own. But this will not last for long. Consider you getting paid and then you spend it and the store pays someone else who spends at end up at another store. But what if everyone spent 80% and saved 20% in the bank? The flow of money would diminish. All the money would end up in the bank, the stores would shut and we'd all be out of work.


The global derivatives market is estimated more than a $300 trillion, now that’s a lot of pile of money. A simple explanation to of a derivative market is currency specific denominated bond is unsecured currency specific debt which needs to be avoided especially when you see the power to devalue the currency rests with the institutions that has issued more bonds. However the risk is mostly secured where each side have made undertakings to each other, which they expect to be able to honor. When all the derivatives trading started it was around $5 trillion back in the 1986 and now $300 trillion which is more than 50 times today. A funny thing, is that whenever they explode, everyone loses all their money, a simple example was the gulf bank of kuwait who lost in their derivatives trading (Kuwait’s Gulf Bank May Have Loss as Derivatives Contracts) a whole new bill or legislation gets passed by ruling country’s politicians who want to make sure 'it never happens again'. But that never works either. After any big bust or a market crash, everyone gets cautious and derivatives disappear for a while. This is a powerful natural cycle.

Gold cannot be replicated. It can only be produced and it’s a scarce natural resource. The demand for gold supply is in competition with its demand. Let us examine a few charts below




                  30 Year Gold Price indicator in US Dollars



5 year Gold Price in UAE Dirham




5 year Gold Price in Kuwaiti Dinars


The above charts are gold prices from the last 5 - 30 years from US Dollar and UAE Dirham and Kuwaiti Dinars. These charts are the inflated adjusted prices.

Now consider this. the money sitting in your banks which is being paid with interest is losing its purchasing power. When I say loosing the purchasing power, it is because the injections of money being put into the system to jump start the economies by the world central bankers. It will start the economy but will give rise to inflation and with this history repeats itself in all the usual ways that is making more and more people buy gold because gold is the actual money. They are alerts by trading signal and indicators and they are afraid of currency devaluation, frightened of bond defaults, and frightened of the rising of a severe financial crisis from derivatives which is what Warren Buffet described the financial weapons of mass destruction. Gentlemen, when you see such a move, it is time to think from a broader perspective.



Gold has one serious utility and that is it is reliability and its rarity. And that's what ordinary savers look for when they want to store future purchasing power. If you had brought 1 troy ounce of gold back in 2005 (1 troy ounce = 31.103 grams), it would have cost you less than 150 Kuwaiti dinars. Today, the same costs your 359.51 Kuwaiti dinars. That’s twice of what you could own back in 2005 than what you can buy today.

To me this supply of a natural resource which maintains its rarity for thousands of years is diminishing while the demand booms, to me gold market looks like it is about to explode and it’s just a matter of time.


Monday, May 10, 2010

Golds Next Level

With the break in price at above $1200, gold has shown that not only the investment demand is coming from the Central banks around the world, fund managers and large institutions are driving the price higher, the fear of uncertainty is at rise. Rumors always had that the price in gold rises due to fear and when this fear subsides, the prices fall. The primary trend of gold over the last decade has been up. This marks that when fear runs, on an average it takes longer time to lose that fear if you have noticed, gold has been running high now in almost every currency.
There have been warnings available at all points. The subprime crisis, the liquidity injection, the Collateral debt obligation (CDO), the failure of US banks, countries like Iceland, Dubai going bankrupt and now Greece being another tip of the iceberg, which is soon to follow along with a lot of other countries like Spain and Portugal. All these signs have been around us. The worthless paper injected into the markets needs to be fused somewhere and this has only begun its wave three of the longest dip.

A Simple answer would be to own physical gold at some place you can trust rather than trusting the corrupt governments and in these times of disaster and inflation which is what you are seeing – yes the inflated price of gold is telling you paper money is about to explode soon and the best way to avoid the risk of being part of that bubble is to exit paper currency to a class of money recognized all over the world which is gold. Friends! The debt bubble is here to stay..
A Close above the levels $1,230 will send the gold price to next levels of atleast 1300 or higher.

The Praetorion