Steve Forbes on the gold standard and gold investing

On bullion investing, Forbes says that when gold is purchased as an asset class, “that tells you that politicians are making a hash of things, central bankers are making a mess.”

DC: I like some of your past thoughts on gold. You said jewelers should be buying gold. Gold miners should be buying gold. It shouldn’t be bought as an asset class.

SF: Well when it has to be bought as an asset class, that tells you that politicians are making a hash of things, central bankers are making a mess. And so gold, if it’s fixed in value, again, the only ones who would buy it would be jewelers, or for some industrial uses and that’s it.

DC: Given the world landscape right now, are you buying gold? What are your thoughts on gold today?

SF: Gold should simply be an insurance policy for your portfolio – so if things go wrong, you’ve got at least something that’s going to protect you. But in terms of investing in gold, that’s a very tricky thing. We’ve seen in the last two years, gold’s gone from US$1900 to $12-1300. So we gotta be very careful. You should just buy it for an insurance policy. And if the politicians do things right, then you can invest your money in productive assets, instead of trying to defend what you have.

DC: What do you think the fair value of gold should be?

SF: Let the market set that. If the government announces that it’s going to fix the dollar to gold, use gold as the ruler, then the markets will tell you pretty quickly. A lot of pricing in recent years of gold was in anticipation of bad things happening, so you’re always trying to divine what the people running the Fed are going to do, like we used to do during the cold war, with the Kremlin, Moscow, trying to divine what they’re doing. The same thing with the Fed: what are these characters going to do next?

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