If central banks are in thrall to gold’s glitter, why not others?
A few weeks ago, when the gold price hit a record high, no one besides a few gold bugs seemed to care. Bitcoin also hit a record high. Everyone cared.
Proof came in the personal finance pages of UK papers. The FT had a piece on investing in crypto miners, a long read on what crypto still gets wrong and a cry of pain for UK investors denied the right to hold Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The Telegraph had almost a full page on how to buy.
Bitcoin also made it into the Daily Mail and got good exposure in the Times too. Unless I missed it, none of these papers had an article on gold. In March, it rose 9.1% (against 14% for Bitcoin and 3% for global equities) and this week the yellow metal hit yet another record high again to a remarkable lack of interest.
I get it. Gold isn’t digital; it doesn’t have a growing gang of evangelists or its own emoji; and it isn’t new money. It’s very old money—one of the oldest.
At Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last week, I saw a few gold coins introduced by Croesus, King of Lydia, in about 550 BCE, a gold coin minted to mark the Olympic Games celebrated in Macedonia in 242, a Sicilian gold quarter-dinar from the 970s and a couple of gold mohrs struck by the Agra mint in 1619. You get the picture. Very old money.
But that you are more likely to see actual gold coins in a museum than in your purse doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. For proof, look at who is buying gold today. A good proxy for gauging ordinary investor interest is flows into global gold ETFs.
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