My Quick Take on Gold as an Investment, a Currency & Money

By Cullen Roche

Another good question here from the Ask Cullen page:

Question: I’ve read some of your stuff on gold, but can you give us a general opinion of the gold standard, gold as money and gold as an investment?

Thanks!

Answer: This one’s pretty simple. Here are my basic views on gold:

1) Gold is definitely money. Remember, anything that is accepted as a means of final payment can serve as a form of money (see my paper on the monetary system for more on this). Gold is definitely accepted as a means of final payment so it serves as a reliable medium of exchange. But gold has a number of characteristics that make it a bad form of money. First, gold isn’t accepted for payment in many places. So that’s a big problem. It’s also very difficult to transport. So gold is money, but it’s a crappy form of money.

2) The gold standard has some serious problems. The biggest is the inherent trade imbalances that would result from such a currency system. Any single currency system like the gold standard is a lot like the Euro in which everyone uses the same currency so there’s no floating exchange rate, the govt’s can’t print money and have trouble redistributing funds from imbalances to rebalance economies and so deflation is the only real answer. That might sound reasonable, but deflation tends to be catastrophic if prolonged. If you see what’s going on in Spain and Greece today you get the gist. They’re locked in a single currency, trade doesn’t rebalance through FX because they all use the same currency, the govt’s can’t print money and so they’re suffering through a depressionary deflation. It’s a disaster. So I dislike the gold standard because I think it’s like putting ourselves in a straight jacket.

Some people want to put the govt alone in a straight jacket, but that’s not entirely rational. Govt should work with us and for us. We shouldn’t have to lock it up. Let’s understand our system better. Not revert back to broken ones.

3) Gold is basically a commodity with currency components. I really dislike commodities as a core piece of a portfolio. I am not, however, against using currencies as a hedging component at times. Gold has tended to perform well when real rates are negative. That is, it acts like a super long duration bond because it is viewed as an ultra safe form of currency. There’s some logic and research behind that position. But still, gold is a commodity at the end of the day and should never be held in huge quantities in a portfolio, in my opinion.

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