-- Posted Monday, 8 April 2013 | | Disqus

In a final poll at the Second edition of the Dubai Precious Metals Conference (see video here) 63 per cent of delegates thought gold was heading towards $3,000 by 2014 and 37 per cent voted for a tumble towards $1,000. The vote followed a lively discussion between the conference’s leading bulls and bears.

Gold guru Andy Smith came out of retirement for the event with a powerful statement of how the accumulated costs of entitlements created by democratic governments would bring the world’s financial system to its knees with debt.

Debt implosion?

Sharps Pixley CEO Ross Norman also focused on the high cost of accumulated debt and how this would spill over into an ever higher gold price. He reckoned some kind of unexpected economic event would finally trigger much higher gold prices in the near future with US debt at 380 per cent of GDP.

Hedge fund manager Christoph Eibl, whose Tiberius Group has $2 billion under management, recalled how lonely he felt as a gold bull in 2001 when nobody wanted to know about gold. Now he found gold widely held by institutions and investors not considering any more additions to their holdings.

From Precious Metals Insights, Philip Klapwijk argued that there is a surplus of around 2,200 tons of gold being produced above demand at present, and that after allowing for 500 tons for the central banks that still means finding investors for 1,700 tons or $90 billion worth of gold each year.

Perhaps this split was to be expected with the gold price up from $250 in 2001 to $1,582 as these gentlemen spoke. This is a 650 per cent rise and after such a run there will always be a divide between those who think that the best is over and it might be best to cash out and those who reckon another leg higher is not hard to envisage.

Bulls win

On balance the generally fairly skeptical Dubai Precious Metals Conference audience voted in favor of the bullish case. That would mean a renewal of the upward momentum that has been stalled for the past 18 months with prices moving lower and sideways.

Still the main drivers of the gold price have not gone away although the financial world does seem better at absorbing shocks. What does it take to send gold higher? A strike by North Korea? Another crisis of confidence in financial markets? Or just a proper consideration of what $1.4 trillion per annum in money printing from the Bank of Japan means for a money that cannot be printed?

-- Posted Monday, 8 April 2013 | Digg This Article

About Peter Cooper:
Oxford University educated financial journalist Peter Cooper found himself made redundant by Emap plc in London in the mid-1990s and decided to rebuild his career in Dubai as launch editor of the pioneering magazine Gulf Business. He returned briefly to London in 1999 to complete his first book, a history of the Bovis construction group.

Then in 2000 he went back to Dubai to become an Internet entrepreneur, just as the dot-com market crashed. But he stumbled across the opportunity to become a partner in www.ameinfo.com, which later became the Middle East's leading English language business news website.

Over the course of the next seven years he had a ringside seat as editor-in-chief writing about the remarkable transformation of Dubai into a global business and financial hub city. At the same time www.ameinfo.com prospered and was sold in 2006 to Emap plc for $27 million, completing the career circle back to where it began a decade earlier.

He remains a lively commentator and columnist as a freelance journalist based in Dubai and travels extensively each summer with his wife Svetlana. His financial blog www.arabianmoney.net is attracting increasing attention with its focus on investment in gold and silver as a means of prospering during a time of great consumer price inflation and asset price deflation.

Order my book online from this link

© 1995 - 2019

Live GoldSeek Visitor Map | Disclaimer