In my travels across the internet, I often hear a disparaging label being thrown around to describe libertarians and adherents of Austrian economics: goldbug.
The Economist’s Free Exchange column from last July encapsulates this perfectly:
The disappointing thing about Ron Paul’s goldbuggery is the weakness of the analysis behind it. His support seems almost mystic in nature: that gold is money is a law of economics that’s held for 6,000 years! In his defence, this quasi-mystical belief in the sanctity of gold in a monetary system was shared by the world’s financial leaders for much of the industrial period. That’s not much of a defence, though. Gold worship repeatedly drove the economy into ditches and off cliffs, but for a few lucky years in which the pace of new gold discoveries fortuitously matched growth in the global economy.
I can do a pretty good job of analysing and deconstructing that (and indeed have already strongly questioned the claim that it was “gold worship” that drove the economy off a cliff in the 1930s) but in the interests of economic “progress”, I would rather outsource my analysis to China. If it’s good enough for Apple, it’s good enough for me.
More specifically, I want to outsource my analysis to Zhang Jianhua of the People’s Bank of China.
Analysts believe China bought as much as 490 tons of gold in 2011, double the estimated 245 tons in 2010. “The thing that’s caught people’s minds is the massive increase in Chinese buying,” remarked Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley, a London gold brokerage, this month.
So who in China is buying all this gold?
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing. “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month. “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency — gold.” He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips. Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof that China, the world’s fifth-largest holder of the metal, is in the market for more.
Wow. This, more or less, is the argument about gold that I advanced last month:
[Gold] doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t create any return. It just sits. It’s a store of long-term purchasing power.
And most importantly it is a hedge against counter-party risk.
What is counter-party risk?
Counter-party risk is the external risk investments face. The counter-party risk to fiat currency is that the counter-party — in this case the government — will fail to deliver a system where that fiat money will be acceptable as payment for goods and services. The counter-party risk to a bond or a derivative or a swap is that the counter-party will default on their obligations.
Gold — at least the physical form — has negligible counter-party risk. It’s been recognised as valuable for thousands of years.
Counter-party risk is a symptom of dependency. And the global financial system is a paradigm of interdependency: inter-connected leverage, soaring gross derivatives exposure, abstract securitisations.
When everyone in the system owes shedloads of money to everyone else the failure of one can often snowball into the failure of the many.
All-denominated fiat securities are touched by counterparty risk, because of the nature of the hyper-interconnected global financial system. Physical gold will still be physical gold, even after the dust settles, even after all the unpayable debt has liquidated, and after the new global financial order has taken shape. That is what Zhang Jianhua — and presumably the PBOC — have understood. For those who possess physical gold, there will be no haircuts or write-downs on that asset. There are precisely zero historical examples of gold-denominated hyperinflation.
This is an entirely different argument to claiming that the monetary base should solely consist gold, of course. The gold standard doesn’t seem to prevent credit-driven bubbles, because it merely restricts the size of the monetary base.
But gold has retained its moneyness, its for 6,000 years for a reason. While value is subjective, I would suggest that its liquidity, its freedom from counterparty risk, its fungibility, and above all its natural scarcity have played a huge part in that.
azizonomics 
Wow cheers for this, good research.
Hey Aziz if you want to read some nonsense you should check this out:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2011/04/17/is-the-peoples-bank-of-china-insolvent/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46205510/ns/business-world_business/t/china-goes-gold-binge-world-wonders-why/#.Tyiru-O2-wI
Wow, that’s some of the worst journalism I’ve ever seen: “We don’t know why China is buying gold. But most likely, we think that China buying gold is a symptom of domestic problems in China, and a lack of confidence in the chinese government, and the failure of the PBOC, even though the PBOC is sitting on a humungous mountain of FX reserves”.
Wow. That’s really asinine.
“[Gold] doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t create any return. It just sits. It’s a store of long-term purchasing power.”
I agree with this in the sense that an uber-rich person (multimillionaire, billionaire) storing all of his money in gold would have still been an uber-rich person (i.e. a person with no worries about tomorrow, who could buy anything the money could buy) during any time interval in the last 2000 years.
If this uber-rich person would have stored his wealth in various paper forms, he’d have to have been very careful.
Otherwise, if you’re not uber-rich, you have to take into account the role of gold as the fear-money. That is, from 1980 to 2001 gold was a loser because confidence in the global economic system and in the dollar was high (so why hold gold?).
For the future, I think FOFOA’s ideas are closer to something attainable than going straight back to a gold-peg. He sees gold (fully physical, no imaginary paper gold) not only as a reserve currency as I’ve stated in an older post but as a reserve currency that will regulate trade imbalances even with all countries keeping their currencies and trading in their own currencies (as opposed to a Bancor as suggested by James G. Rickards).
PS: Not to mention that if freed from the fraudulent paper claims and manipulation, the price could even erase most of the debts of the developed world.
“I can do a pretty good job of analysing and deconstructing that (and indeed have already strongly questioned the claim that it was “gold worship” that drove the economy off a cliff in the 1930s) but in the interests of economic “progress”, I would rather outsource my analysis to China.”
There was some truth to the money printing and re-pegging that brought significant advantages to some countries in the interwar period. James G. Rickards did a pretty good job describing the Currency Wars in the interwar period. It’s dirty, and the sign of a dysfunctional global economic system, but devaluing your currency faster than others can bring advantages to a country to the detriment of all other countries participating in international trade.
Just to be clear for other readers that haven’t read other comments of mine, James G. Rickards is a gold-bug and doesn’t blame the Great Depression on gold worship. I merely stated that devaluing the currency could have brought advantages to the countries that did it first.
Heh, my general impression is that the gains from devaluation are not only small in effect, but mostly illusory, based on external purchasers fooling themselves into believing they are getting more for their money and thus buying more. It’s not an issue of economics so much as one of psychology.
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