| Follow us @ twitter.com twitter.com Welcome to Capital Account. In one of his writings, a leading English art critic of the Victorian era, John Ruskin, told the story of a man who boarded a ship carrying his entire wealth in a large bag of gold coins. When a storm hit a few days into the voyage and the decision was made to abandon ship, the man strapped the bag around his waist, jumped overboard, and sank straight to the bottom of the sea. The man's body was found with the wreck of the ship many years later. Reflecting on this, Ruskin asked "Now, as he was sinking, had he the gold? Or had the gold him?" We tell you this story to impress upon you the enduring value that gold has held in the minds of people through the centuries. It has represented not only a store of value, but a means to an end...any end, including one that concludes at thebottom of the sea. For muchof Western history, gold has been synonymous with money. It was not so long ago that the United States and Europe fixed their currencies to gold, and despite the free floating currency regime that we have had since the end of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, one could argue that we are still on a defacto gold standard. After all, gold has been rising steadily, and at times rather frenetically, since 2001, when it was trading at below 300 dollars per ounce, to levels nearing 2000 dollars in the past year. There are those, like Nouriel Roubini, who have been calling it a bubble since at least 2009. One of the ... |
