When Markets Get Scary, Mom and Pop Buy Gold

livemint.com:

Joe Susanno lost thousands of dollars from his retirement account betting on biotech shares in early 2021. Now the 44-year-old integration engineer from Gloucester, Mass., is putting his money into an investment whose value has held up over a longer run: gold coins. “Precious metals are kind of what just makes it so I can sleep at night, where I hold it and nobody can hurt me," Susanno said.

“It’s impossible that I’m going to end up in a bread line somewhere, waiting for someone to drop something into my hand, so I can eat." Susanno isn’t alone. More than a year of inflation, interest-rate increases, bank failures and market craziness have lured many other individual investors to precious metals such as gold and silver. Gold prices have gained about 8% this year to around $1,970 a troy ounce.

That includes a March surge fueled by the banking crisis, which carried them near their record of $2,069.40, hit in 2020. The percentage of Americans who believe gold is the best long-term investment jumped to 26% this year from 15% in 2022, according to a Gallup report from May. In contrast, those preferring stocks dropped to 18% from 24% last year, while those favoring bonds climbed to 7% from 4%.

The U.S. Mint has sold 5.56 million troy ounces of gold coins since the pandemic struck the U.S. in March 2020, compared with 3.26 million in the four-year period before that.

Matt Malleo, executive director at the precious-metals dealer SchiffGold, said his company’s revenue hit a record in early spring. “There has definitely been a gradual accumulation by just about all classes of investors—institutional and individual investors themselves," said George Milling-Stanley, chief gold strategist at State Street Global Advisors. Gold has