From Market Oracle... please read !!!

The Impact on Gold

While market attention has been riveted on the price of gold a more important feature of the gold market has caused gold to evolve as money, in increasingly difficult times. The concerns of the Chinese are the concerns of all investors particularly U.S. investors the main buyers of gold shares in the gold Exchange Traded Funds. Consequently, this has broadened the base and improved the quality of gold investors worldwide. While the jewelry trade has retreated from gold and scrap sales have supported the supply of gold, the time is coming when supplies will just not be enough to satisfy investors and scrap sales peter out. The only way such investors will be deterred from buying then is a gold price rising out of their buying zones. This will certainly mean an over four-figure gold price.

The fears of investors are outside the gold market and concern exchange rates, massive tsunamis of dollars and other currencies being printed to shore up the present system in the grips of a credit crunch. Many investors are certain inflation is roaring towards us, to spring up, as deflation is overcome. The future of the monetary system is bleak and extreme.

Locally, gold is priced in home currencies and serves as a hedge against the dramatic moves of those currencies. Rapidly, investors are seeing that their price of gold doesn't reflect only the value of gold, but the value of their local currencies as well. Awareness of gold as a protection against weakening currencies is growing rapidly. This awareness is growing in central banks, sovereign wealth funds, institutions, amongst wealthy individuals and is now spreading to the man in the street. Once sound money backed by assets was forsaken in favor of man managed and created money, the disintegration of the banking system, the credit system and confidence in currencies and economies was inevitable. Only the credibility of and confidence in paper money made it work anyway. That now stands badly mauled with potentially worse to come. But most observers are not buying gold yet! Once they do, sit back and wonder!

As Greenspan wrote decades ago, "Without a gold standard in place, there is little to prevent governments indulging in wild credit creation. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process." We do not believe there will be a Gold Standard because it is anathema to all bankers, central bankers included. What is likely to happen is that a formula will be worked out where gold can be used to increase the credibility of and confidence in paper money again. Before that discussion comes to reality, individuals and institutions are and will turn to gold. When governments contemplate gold's use in money again, you can be sure they will want the metal to themselves and exclude Joe public!

Allah Hu.