QE3 Dollar & Gold

Le point de vue de Myret Zaki

La décision de la Fed d'acheter pour 40 milliards/ mois d'obligations américaines promet un désastre pour le dollar et un krach de la dette souveraine américaine.

En voulant regonfler la bulle immobilière, la Fed est en train d'arnaquer ceux qui détiennent des $, des obligations en $, de l'épargne en $, des salaires en $, et des retraites en $.
L'inflation se cache dans la bulle des actifs financiers des matières premières.

Retrouvez chaque mercredi un vidéo-édito de Myret Zaki, rédactrice en chef adjointe de Bilan, sur un thème d'actualité économique ainsi que des interventions d'autres membres de la rédaction et des interviews de personnalités.

Comments :

A good signal then to continue to accumulate gold. Either this liberal economic system will collapse (through explosion -revolution- or implosion -hyper inflation-) or simply some kind of fixed exchange rate will be imposed to an new international monetary system where gold will be a key part (as it had been for 3'000 years).

Gold bugs are no doubt viewing the Fed’s announcement of QE3 – $40 billion in monthly bond purchases – as rocket fuel for another multi-year gold rally. 

The gold price has had a shakeout since peaking at around $1,900 an ounce a year ago. It fell as low as $1,566 in June. Since then, it has risen to $1,776.

Russia is bulking up its gold reserve

According to the World Gold Council, Russia has more than doubled its gold reserves in the past five years. Putin has taken advantage of the financial crisis to build the world’s fifth-biggest gold pile in a handful of years, and is buying about half a billion dollars’ worth every month.

It emerged last month that financial gurus George Soros and John Paulson had also increased their bullion exposure, but it’s Putin that’s really caught my eye.

No one else in the world plays global power politics as ruthlessly as Russia’s chilling strongman, the man who effectively stole a Super Bowl ring from Bob Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, when they met in Russia some years ago.

Putin’s moves may matter to your finances, because there are two ways to look at gold.

On the one hand, it’s an investment that by most modern standards seems to make no sense. It generates no cash flow and serves no practical purpose. Warren Buffett has pointed out that we dig it out of one hole in the ground only to stick it in another, and anyone watching this from Mars would be very confused.

You can forget claims that it’s “real” money. There’s no such thing. Money is just an accounting device, a way of keeping track of how much each of us produces and consumes. Gold is a shiny and somewhat tacky looking metal that is malleable, durable and heavy. 

But there’s another way to look at gold: As the most liquid reserve in times of turmoil, or worse.

The big story of our era is not that the Spanish government is broke, nor is it that Paul Ryan apparently feels the need to embellish his running record. It’s that the United States, which has dominated the world’s economy for several lifetimes, is in relative decline.

We will soon be the first people in two hundred years to live in a world not dominated by either Pax Americana or Pax Britannica. This sort of changing of the guard has never been peaceful. The declines of the Spanish, French and British empires were all accompanied by conflict. The decline of British hegemony was a leading cause of the First and Second World Wars.

We may be about to enter a much more turbulent and dangerous era of power politics and international competition.

Not long ago, world gold reserves were mainly in the hands of the U.S. and the Europeans, which accumulated their holdings during their centuries at the top. The U.S. has 75% of its currency reserves in gold. Many other first world powers have comparable proportions.

But that’s beginning to change. According to the World Gold Council, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are now in the top five. Western European countries have been selling gold. If the current financial crisis gets any worse, they may yet sell more.

Emerging markets have been buying. In most cases, gold remains a very small percentage of their total reserves. China, despite its recent buying, holds less than 2% of its currency reserves in gold.

But you have to wonder how long emerging countries will want to hold their reserves in any currency that is controlled by someone else. Vladimir Putin clearly doesn’t want to. Gold now accounts for 9% of Russia’s reserves, and that figure is rising.