Thread: China, gold, and the civilization shift

China, gold, and the civilization shift

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics
Last updated: November 26th, 2009
67 Comments

Stephen Jen from the hedge fund Blue Gold Capital has a warning for those who think that gold has risen far too high, is necessarily in a speculative bubble, and must soon come clattering back down.



Mr Jen is an expert on sovereign wealth funds from his days at Morgan Stanley. The gold story — essentially — is that the rising economic powers of Asia, the Middle East, and the commodity bloc are rejecting Western fiat currencies. China, India, and Russia have all been buying gold on a large scale over recent months.

Why should that stop when the AAA club of sovereign debtors is pushing towards the danger threshold of 100pc of GDP?

These new players account for almost all the accumulation of foreign currency reserves worldwide over the last five years, so what they do matters enormously.

After crunching the numbers, Mr Jen found that the share of gold in their reserves is just 2.2pc compared to 38pc for the Old World (perhaps we should just call them the deadbeats from now on). They would have to buy $115bn of gold at current prices to raise their bullion to just 5pc of total reserves, and $700bn to reach just half western levels.

The killer-term here is at current prices since any such move in the tiny global market for gold would send prices into the stratosphere.

Mr Jen says that you know where you are in the currency markets — more or less — because there are concepts of “fair valueâ€

Interesting