Rio Tinto names Shell’s Katie Jackson as new copper chief
Jackson, who is the current president of National Grid Ventures, an energy group, joins Rio Tinto on September 1.
Gold is ringing out the year on a sour note, dropping below $1,550/oz and losing nearly 10% of its value in the last month.
Falling gold prices have weighed down the TSX, which is up only 0.6 % over the last month while down in the United States’ S&P 500 is up 5.45% over the same period.
Silver has also been hit, falling 16% over the last month to just $27.46/oz.
Investors are fleeing to cash while the European debt crisis grows murkier, and job data out of the U.S. turns south.
Investors are worried about a repeat of 2008 when commodity positions were liquidated to meet a cash crunch.
Joshua Brown, writing for The Reformed Broker, takes another tack and argues that gold is a classic crowded trade and prices were bound to unwind. It was just a matter of when:
Gold had become the quintessential crowded trade and at the height of the Euro crisis this summer it had gotten flat out silly. The way people off The Street were talking about it sounded an awful lot like the one-way run in real estate a few years back. For me, a correction was obviously going to occur but it became a question of when and from what price. I’ve mentioned 2000 an ounce here and there as where I thought the big selling would come in. Close but no cigar.
Comments
Dan Oancea
“The bubble is in paper currency creation, not in physical gold,” said Ben Davies, the London-based manager of the Hinde Gold Fund.
I agree. USD didn’t get stronger because US paid its debt or their economy’s doing better already. It got stronger because of euro going down. The USD printing press still works full time. Wait & see the results.