What Goldbugs Have Been Waiting For: Goldman’s New Primer On Gold

The good news is that Goldman believes “precious metals remain a relevant asset class in modern portfolios, despite their lack of yield” and disagrees with Ben Bernanke and the naysayers “They are neither a historic accident or a relic. Indeed, by looking at each of the physical properties of an ideal long-term store of value…we can clearly see why precious metals were initially adopted and why they remain relevant today.”

It was sounding really good – and there was 91 pages to go - although when it came to the drivers of precious metal prices, Goldman did not exactly re-invent the wheel “We see two key drivers of the precious metals markets: Fear and Wealth”

That said, there was a new take on what, in Goldman's eyes constitutes fear as “in our new framework we see a closer link to growth expectations. However, we ?nd that many risk factors are relevant, depending on the sub-component of gold demand: real interest rates, debasement risks, sovereign balance sheet risks, geopolitical risks and other market tail-risks. Stated more simply, we are talking about the drivers of “risk-on”/”risk-off” behavior in markets.”

On the wealth angle, the good news for gold was that “as economies grow, they tend to go through a rapid gold accumulation phase at around per capita GDP of $20,000-$30,000, following a ‘hump-shaped’ relationship between per capita income and gold demand. As more EM economies (including China) are set to grow to these income levels over the next few decades.” 

As in-depth students of gold market research, our mood was lifted by some genuinely original research. Goldman found that the ratio between gold purchases and household savings (global we assume) has been broadly stable at around 1.7% for almost 40 years. Who knew that.

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