China and India buying put a floor under au...so the story goes
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By: Kenneth Gerbino, Kenneth J. Gerbino & Company
Gold Market
The financial crisis is now a year behind us and so far with very little inflation (which won’t last long) it is unusual for gold to be acting so robust. Usually when one sees a stock or a commodity going up when most of the usual reasons for its normal price behavior are absent, it signifies new, powerful and unknown force(s) have entered the marketplace.
There are four new forces that were not present in past cycles: 1&2) Central Bank and Sovereign Wealth Funds buying bullion discreetly and in an orderly fashion. With the recent Indian purchase of 200 tonnes of IMF gold this force is now out in the open. The fact this was not done covertly and undercover is very unusual. It is also very bullish, as it implies that other central banks are going to be doing the same thing. 3) Financial Institutions and money managers who have never invested in gold are buying gold as a small percent of their portfolio as pure monetary insurance. These three buying forces should be long term and steady investors. They will not be price sensitive buyers. They will look at gold for the long term in a way that quarter to quarter performance conscious money managers or traders do not. They will buy gold as insurance against the follies of governments including their own. They are also the deepest of pockets and could easily accumulate as much gold each year as is annually mined or disinvested by traders and scared retail sellers. 4) The last force is a hybrid of the old standby “gold bug” crowd and represents a new retail crowd outside of and distinct from the old line street wise buyer in India and China or hard money person. I call this force the nickel and dime force. It means that all over the world (in a hundred or more countries) small amounts of gold are being bought by people because of the unnerving events of the last 18 months. The buyers of this gold are people from the highest to lowest income tiers. Collectively they could swamp the even the institutions with buying power.
The largest jewelry retail market in the world, India, has significantly reduced gold imports. Taking up the slack is investment demand that is not readily defined. Therefore this slack, in my opinion is coming from the above four areas.