Premature Grave Dancing

Premature Grave Dancing

Readers may have noticed that there simply is no other asset that provokes more intense hatred in the mainstream press than gold. When the gold price declines as it has done since 2011, the press is literally brimming over with Schadenfreude, grave dancing exercises and anti-gold tirades. The lengthy preamble above is an attempt to explain why this is the case.

Intense grave dancing – the poor fellow at the bottom is Mr. Gold

Engraving by Michael Wolgemut

Simply put, gold is the one asset that provides the most reliable indictments of central economic planning and the abominable monetary and economic system that has been forced on us by the etatistes. In spite of its innumerable failures, socialism and its close cousin, modern-day corporatism (i.e., crony socialism), remains highly popular with the intellectual class, as it provides it with influence and money beyond its wildest dreams.

Unfortunately, it is even more popular with big business. The handful of large corporations that are controlling the press these days are not exactly big fans of the free market and its unfettered competition either. Established big business organizations prefer to keep upstart competition suppressed by means of obtaining privileges from the State. One would think that business should be against the over-regulation that characterizes today’s bureaucratic Leviathan State. This is not the case: Since it harms small emerging competitors more than established businesses, they are actually in favor of it.

Needless to say, the most powerful industry of modern times, the fractionally reserved banking cartel, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system and as such provides sheer unlimited funding to keep things right as they are.

When gold’s fall accelerated recently, we have seen an outpouring of doom-saying and thinly disguised contempt in the mainstream press that actually puts everything seen before into the shade. In a way this is surprising; after all, gold is a completely unimportant asset, right? Just think about this for a moment. If another currency, such as e.g. the yen, suffers a big decline, is it subjected to even remotely comparable vitriol in the press? Here are a few examples from the last week or so (with a few comments by us interspersed):

From Bloomberg (Bloomberg belongs to a limousine socialist, and is well-known for its pro-central banking/ pro-money printing and anti-gold editorial line. Some of the most ludicrous articles about gold ever published have appeared on Bloomberg):

Gold Slump Not Over as Speculators Go Net-Short for First Time – apparently Bloomberg’s authors have yet to hear about contrarian signals.

Gold Is Only Going to Get Worse (“Our survey shows a majority of traders and investors aren’t optimistic”) – indeed, Bloomberg seems to be blissfully unaware of contrarian sentiment analysis.

Gold Could Fall to the $1,000 Mark (video)

Good Luck Bargain Hunting for Gold Miners – naturally, gold miners are even more doomed than gold itself…

From the Wall Street Journal:

Let’s Get Real About Gold: It’s a Pet Rock – actually, as we have previously pointed out, it’s a door stop, not a pet rock. We should perhaps mention here what Jason Zweig, the author of this WSJ article, wrote in 2011 right at gold’s peak. From Mr. Zweig’s WSJ Article of September 17, 2011:

“Growing numbers of investing experts have been declaring that gold is a bubble: an insanely overvalued asset whose price is bound to burst. There is no basis for that opinion.”

With respect to gold miners (which since then are down by more than 80%) he opined:

“But there is one aspect of gold investing where it is possible to make rational estimates of value: the stocks of gold-mining companies. And, by historical standards, they seem cheap—based not on subjective forecasts of continuing fiscal apocalypse, but on objective measures of stock-market valuation.”

This is really a textbook example of how market sentiment works.

From Marketwatch:

The carnage isn’t over in gold, other metals-mining stocks

Study predicts gold could plunge to $350 an ounce (i.e., here come the extreme predictions, the inverse of the vast bullish consensus and the extreme bullish predictions that were made at the peak by gold bulls)

And all of this was finally crowned with the following pronouncement in the Washington Post:

Gold is doomed

Interestingly the author of this article, Matt O’Brian, actually gets one thing right, although his conclusion remains utterly wrong – he writes:

“When you think about it, a bet on gold is really a bet that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.”

That’s exactly what it is Mr. O’Brian. The wrong conclusion he comes to is this one:

”But economists do, for the most part, know what they’re doing.”

 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-01/gold-and-grave-dancers