18 November 2013 - Gold shifts from West toward East |
- 18 November 2013 - Gold shifts from West toward East
- 18 November 2013 - Asia consumers going for gold
- 18 November 2013 - 看好反弹 鲍尔森“咬定黄金不放松”
- 16 November 2013 - Republicans Asserting Reliance on Gold as World Loses Faith
| 18 November 2013 - Gold shifts from West toward East Posted: 18 Nov 2013 03:06 AM PST From:http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20131118/BIZ/311189954/1031/BIZ? BEIJING – A gold vault that can store 2,000 metric tons, double China's projected consumption this year, opened in Shanghai this month as owner Malca-Amit Global seeks to benefit from rising demand in Asia's largest economy. The facility is the biggest for the Hong Kong company, and it can also store diamonds, jewelry and art, said Joshua Rotbart, precious metals general manager. The site could hold bullion worth about $82.7 billion at current prices, calculations by Bloomberg show. China's demand may reach 1,000 tons this year, the World Gold Council forecasts. Consumption in China may increase 29 percent to a record this year, overtaking India as biggest user, according to the WGC. Demand for gold jewelry, bars and coins in greater China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam is now about 60 percent of the global total, up from 35 percent in 2004, according to HSBC Holdings. The investment in Shanghai's new free-trade zone reflects a shift in world demand away from the U.S. and Europe toward Asia. U.S. bullion is headed for its first annual drop in 13 years; expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will curb stimulus is hurting investment demand, spurring record outflows from exchange-traded products. The Shanghai vault "is a massive vote of confidence for the Chinese gold market," said Philip Klapwijk, of Hong Kong-based Precious Metals Insights, who has monitored precious metals since 1988. "There's going to be more gold coming to China," Rotbart said. "This place can be used as a trade hub, basically, so foreign banks can trade with domestic banks within this facility, saving costs and time." The new vault is targeted at international and Chinese financial institutions, as well as the arts community, Rotbart said. While gold in China and elsewhere in Asia is traditionally seen as a way of preserving wealth, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are among those forecasting losses. Bullion will average $1,175 in the third quarter of next year, according to the median of estimates from the 10 most accurate precious metals analysts tracked by Bloomberg in a survey published last month. Prices were last at that level in 2010. Investors sold more than 755 tons from gold-backed ETPs, or exchange traded products, this year as holdings contracted every month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. There is a risk that bullion may drop below $1,000 an ounce as the Fed withdraws stimulus and economic data improve, according to a Goldman Sachs forecast issued Sept. 13. "There's been a lot of gold being sold out of ETFs (exchange-traded funds), all of that is outside of China," said Victor Thianpiriya, a Singapore-based analyst at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. "A lot of that has found its way to China via Hong Kong, attracted by demand for bullion Source:http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20131118/BIZ/311189954/1031/BIZ? |
| 18 November 2013 - Asia consumers going for gold Posted: 18 Nov 2013 03:04 AM PST From:http://www.bt.com.bn/business-world/2013/11/18/asia-consumers-going-gold PETALING JAYA Monday, November 18, 2013 GOLD, as an investment, has had a horrid year and will probably continue to disappoint investors next year. But Asian consumers are unperturbed, as they see the sharp decline in bullion prices as a golden opportunity to stock up their hoard of the precious metal. The benchmark spot gold price in New York had dropped 22 per cent year-to-date at US$1,287 an ounce on Saturday and was heading into its first annual loss in more than a decade. Some analysts predict prices will fall even lower in 2014, with Goldman Sachs' commodity research head Jeffery Currie declaring gold a "slam dunk" sell for next year. Currie also says that gold may "overshoot" below the US$1,000 mark in the near term as fund managers and savers in the West continue to unwind their positions in gold investment products ahead of the US Federal Reserve's plan to taper down its monthly bond-buying programme. HSBC chief metal analyst James Steel announced that "gold's more-than-decade-long bull market ended this year." The price of gold has had a spectacular run up since the start of the new millennium, but gold's shiny investment status as the safest bet at times of crisis may have run its course, at least in the West, as risk appetite return for fast-money fund managers. Since the burst of the US dotcom IT bubble in 2000, the price of gold has soared from US$300 an ounce to a dizzying height of US$1,920 on September 6, 2011. The bullion more than doubled its value from early 2007 to mid-2011 after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the start of Greek crisis. Gold supporters in past years argued that loose money-printing programme by central banks in developed economies to jumpstart growth will fuel inflation on a global scale that will render paper currency useless everywhere. Source:http://www.bt.com.bn/business-world/2013/11/18/asia-consumers-going-gold |
| 18 November 2013 - 看好反弹 鲍尔森“咬定黄金不放松” Posted: 18 Nov 2013 02:56 AM PST From:http://gold.jrj.com.cn/2013/11/18143216168930.shtml 在黄金投资上栽了大跟头的华尔街对冲基金经理约翰·鲍尔森，最近似乎又重新坚定了持有黄金的信心。 根据鲍尔森的基金上周向美国证券交易委员会提交的13F持仓报告，鲍尔森三季度末仍持有1023万股的SPDR黄金信托，后者是全球最大的黄金ETF。这一比例与二季度末几乎没有变动。鲍尔森基金也是该黄金ETF的最大单一投资人。 第二季度，鲍尔森曾经猛砍黄金持仓，降幅高达50%以上。今年3月底，鲍尔森持有黄金ETF的份额还高达2180万股。 市场人士分析，鲍尔森三季度坚守黄金持仓，可能是看好金价短期将出现反弹。鲍尔森基金在10月份的一份致投资人的报告中写道，未来高通胀的风险，使得黄金成为一种长期内有吸引力的投资工具。 不过，这一观点并不为高盛等大行认可。高盛的分析师库里表示，2014年金价可能大跌。在10月份的一份报告中，高盛将金价的12个月价格目标预测砍至1100美元。 从市场的走势看，鲍尔森这一次似乎"押宝"正确，最近黄金价格的确有回暖迹象。 今年4月，黄金跌入技术熊市。不过，自今年6月创下近三年低点以来，金价出现了一定的反弹，迄今的反弹幅度在9%左右。而整个三季度，金价累计涨了8.4%，为一年来的首次季度上涨。 尽管如此，今年全球，黄金仍很可能出现年度下跌，从而终结之前创下的连续12年上涨的惊人纪录。自2011年9月创下1923.7美元历史新高以来，黄金价格已累计跌了超过三成，美联储可能开始步入货币政策正常化以及经济的复苏，是打压金价的主要原因。 黄金今年跑输了几乎所有其他资产类别。同期，覆盖24种大宗商品的标普高盛商品价格指数跌幅仅为4.4%左右。而在股市，MSCI所有国家世界指数同期大涨17%，而美元指数也涨了3%左右。 来自世界黄金协会的数据显示，第三季度，全球对黄金的需求骤降21%，投资人通过ETF及类似产品抛售了118.7吨的黄金。 根据彭博的数据，总体来看，全球黄金ETF持仓今年以来下降了29%，创下自2010年以来最低水平。同期，黄金ETF的市值缩水了640亿美元以上。 尽管鲍尔森依然坚定看好，但不少市场人士对金价后市并不乐观。Oakbrook投资首席投资官杨科夫斯基斯表示，今年稍早出现的黄金抛售潮将部分投资者赶出了市场，眼下，黄金最惨淡的时刻可能已过去，但前景依然看空，并不适宜投资。 美国大宗商品期货交易委员会的数据显示，在截至11月5日的一周时间里，黄金的净看涨头寸减少13%，至87689份期货和期权合约。看跌头寸增加37%，创10月15日以来的最大涨幅；看涨头寸降低4.9%。 |
| 16 November 2013 - Republicans Asserting Reliance on Gold as World Loses Faith Posted: 17 Nov 2013 04:59 PM PST As the price of gold hit new highs following the 2008 financial crisis, Republicans saw the yellow metal's steady ascent as a sign of trouble ahead. To Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, record gold prices in 2010 heralded "a lower standard of living for many Americans." Representative Ted Poe of Texas foresaw "a blast of inflation that will crush the middle class" adding: "Where gold prices go, other prices follow." Fellow Texas Representative Ron Paul, a perennial critic of the Federal Reserve, warned that "confidence is being lost in the entire fiat monetary system," a reference to money created by central banks. The Republicans' confidence in gold as an economic and financial barometer proved ill-founded. Five years after the crisis, the dollar's value measured against the currencies of major U.S. trading partners is little changed. Prices have risen at an annual 1.4 percent rate, less than half the 50-year average and lower than the Fed's 2 percent target. By July, gold had slid 36 percent from its September 2011 high of more than $1,900 an ounce, the steepest percentage decline since prices plunged by 58 percent over 21 months ending in June 1982. While many Wall Street analysts, including Jeffrey Currie at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., say gold will continue to decline as the economy grows, some leading Republicans continue to urge a special role for bullion. Sound Dollar So far this year, 52 lawmakers lined up to cosponsor Texas Representative Kevin Brady's "Sound Dollar Act," which would require the Fed to keep prices stable by monitoring a variety of assets, including gold, and by tracking "the value of the United States dollar relative to gold." Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced similar legislation in February. Neither bill has been acted upon. "It's a stupid idea," Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist, said in an interview. "It's pretty clear the Fed thinks so, too, since they do the opposite. They go out of their way to exclude commodities." Gagnon, now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, says the Fed tracks most closely "core" inflation readings that exclude often-volatile commodities. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, also has been among Republicans who've suggested the Fed should peg the dollar to a "basket of commodities" that would include gold. Eliminating Taxes In April, three days after gold completed its worst two-day decline in more than 30 years, Lee, joined by Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, proposed legislation to eliminate taxes on gold and silver currency declared legal tender by federal or state governments. The measure would effectively allow the metals, now taxed at sale as collectibles, to serve as alternative currencies. Spokesmen for Brady, Ryan, Lee, Cruz and Paul declined to comment. Poe's office didn't respond to requests for comment. Rich Danker, director of economics for the American Principles Project, a Washington-based organization that advocates smaller government and free markets, calls legislation such as Lee's a "prerequisite" for a return to the gold standard, which his group supports. Danker dismissed gold's recent decline. "The gold standard has never been about the floating price of gold," he said. "Gold's long-term value has always been steady. There's no reason to think that would change over hundreds of years." 19th Century The idea of anchoring U.S. currency to a precious metal dominated economic debates in the late 19th century with factions dueling over the use of gold, silver or both. Since the Democratic Party split in 1896 between the pro-gold incumbent President Grover Cleveland and his intra-party rival William Jennings Bryan, gold has been almost entirely a Republican obsession. "I can't think of any Democrat who's for it," said Richard Grossman, economics professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and author of the book "Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them." President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, took the dollar off the gold standard in one of his first moves to combat the Great Depression in 1933. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, broke the last link to gold in August 1971, ending the ability of foreign central banks to convert dollars into a fixed quantity of the metal. 'QE Infinity' In a November 2012 speech to an APP conference, Cruz, a Tea Party favorite, assailed the Fed's $85 billion in monthly asset purchases -- an economic stimulus program known as quantitative easing -- which he says puts the dollar at risk. "We're in the middle of QE infinity right now," he said. "And when you see the currency debased, it is a cruel tax on everyone working and struggling and saving. As we've seen gold skyrocket, and we've seen oil skyrocket, we've seen food skyrocket, we've seen the cost of living for those struggling to climb the economic ladder get higher and higher and higher." Gold fans bemoan the dollar's loss of purchasing power in terms of how much gold it will buy, though that hasn't affected the cost of living. Since December 2008, the consumer price index has risen at an annual rate of 1.6 percent, compared with 2.8 percent during the 2001-2009 Bush administration. Bernanke Stumped The meaning of gold price movements remains a subject of dispute among economists. In July, Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada asked Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to explain gold's rollercoaster rise and fall. "Nobody really understands gold prices," said Bernanke, who was chairman of Princeton University's economics department. "And I don't pretend to really understand them either." Heller today posed a similar question to Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen at a hearing on her nomination to succeed Bernanke. "I don't think anybody has a very good model of what makes gold prices go up or down," Yellen said. "It is an asset that people want to hold when they're very fearful about potential financial market catastrophe or economic troubles." Further complicating efforts to fathom price movements are profound changes in the gold market. The rise of exchange-traded funds, for example, opened the market to retail investors, allowing them to buy shares representing physical holdings of gold without the hassle of taking delivery. Such funds, which held more than 84 million ounces of gold in December compared with less than 2 million ounces eight years earlier, were a major force behind gold's pre-financial crisis surge, according to Marc Chandler, chief currency strategist for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. "Before, you had to buy gold bullion," he said. "Now ETFs gave access to people who didn't have it before." Safe Haven During gold's 12-year bull market, the metal was touted as a store of value as well as an investment in its own right. Popular interest in the traditional safe haven mushroomed alongside fear of an eroding dollar. Gold prices roughly tripled in five years, topping $1,000 an ounce for the first time in March 2008. On March 10, 2009, Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho introduced into the Congressional Record a letter from a constituent he identified as "Adam," who cited an 18th-century law to urge the death penalty for those responsible for the dollar's shrinkage. "Heads should have rolled after we abandoned the gold and silver standards," the letter read. "I am sure you know what debasing currency is. This is what helped bring Rome to an end." Interest in gold rose alongside the Fed's unprecedented expansion of credit to fight the recession. From around $900 billion in August 2008, the Fed's balance sheet expanded to its current $3.85 trillion. Gold completed 12 consecutive years of higher prices in 2012. Republican Platform That same year, the belief that gold's rise signaled a loss of faith in the U.S. dollar inspired a provision in the Republican Party platform calling for a study of a "metallic basis for U.S. currency," a possible return to the gold standard. The move was more than just a sop to supporters of Paul's longshot presidential bid, according to Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the platform committee chairwoman. The platform planks were "adopted because they are things that Republicans agree on," Blackburn told the Financial Times. "This is something that we think needs to be done." Supporters of a new gold standard -- wandering in the political wilderness since a 1982 Reagan administration commission squelched their last bid -- welcomed the discussion. Elsewhere, the idea was derided as a relic of a bygone age. Bernanke already had ruled it out, saying in a March 2012 lecture at George Washington University that it "would not be feasible for both practical reasons and policy reasons." State Lawmakers Elite opposition did nothing to quell interest in gold outside the nation's capital. Before the metal's April price plunge -- its worst in 30 years -- several states considered proposals to recognize bullion as currency. A lawmaker in Texas proposed creating a Texas Bullion Depository to store gold, an idea championed by Republican Governor Rick Perry. Utah passed a bill making gold and silver coins legal tender in 2011, when it also eliminated state capital gains or other taxes on the coins. In Utah, with a population of 2.8 million, about 250 people are participating in a pilot program that lets them pay bills from an account established with deposits of gold, said Lawrence Hilton, an attorney and chairman of the Utah Precious Metals Association, which established the initiative. The number of participants has risen from 100 in April, despite gold's decline, he says. The group encourages members to buy at regular intervals, saying that will smooth out price fluctuations and hedge against inflation. Unreliable Indicator Gold actually is an unreliable inflation indicator, according to recent academic research. Economists Jonathan Batten of Australia's Monash University, Cetin Ciner of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Brian Lucey of Trinity College, Dublin studied the relationship between gold and inflation since 1985 and concluded "a stable link between these variables does not exist." Likewise, Andrew Ang of Columbia University wrote in 2012 that gold has only a 1 percent correlation with inflation. "Gold has not been an inflation hedge over the last 130 years," he wrote, adding that gold prices demonstrate a strong tendency to revert to their long-term average. Americans' fervor for gold as an investment has also ebbed. In an April Gallup survey, 24 percent of respondents called the metal "the best long-term investment," down from 34 percent in August 2011. Gold fans are undeterred by studies or 27 months of falling prices. "Could you have a period of several months, or even several years, where gold is in a downward trend? Yes, that can happen," said Hilton. "But it should come around." |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Home To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 Comment for "18 November 2013 - Gold shifts from West toward East"