If there is a recession on, it surely wasn’t visible from the beaches of Ocean City last week.
The town was mobbed, and Maryland crabs were going upwards of $60 a dozen — if you could find them. (I couldn’t.)
I’m not sure why I go to the place. Sure, the water is clean, the beach is large, and the girls are beautiful…
But people are everywhere. At times, I felt like I was in Bombay.
The upside is that it’s close, and I don’t have to listen to my offspring squabble in the backseat for more than a few hours.
While I was there, I rented an umbrella ($20) and a chair ($9) from the beach guy. I sarcastically asked if he would take cash or if he preferred gold…
He scratched his unshaven jaw and replied that gold was going down and the dollar had just hit a three-year high against a basket of currencies, so he’d take the latter if it was all the same to me.
“Ah, but perhaps it is time for a rebound,” I said digging in the sand with the toe of my flip-flop. “A dead cat bounce, if you will.”
Setting down the chair, I pulled a handy chart from under my straw hat. Shaking out the sand, I smoothed it out on his cooler and pointed out the big fat doji that just formed at the bottom of the trend.
“After all, gold has been down all year — nine of the last ten months, in fact.”
I went on to tell him that since the bull market in gold started in 2001, gold has gone up more in the second half of the year.
According to Thomson Reuters, gold gains in the second half of the year have more than doubled the returns in the first half, averaging 11%.
Furthermore, gold has now dropped below the cost it takes to dig it out of the ground. The bullish case is that because mining costs are high, miners will have to close or scale back mines. Supply will evaporate and marginal buyers will rush to buy what gold is left.
Add to this the standard gold bug tropes of excessive money printing, a storehouse of value, Chinese and Indians buying, and general contrarian style of investing, and you could see gold break above $2,000.
“Ah,” he said, “but even in the bad old days around 2000, when gold was selling for $250 an ounce, mines were still producing. Gold miners must produce, regardless of the cost.”
“Plus,” he went on, “miners hedge production forward to lock in prices and reduce risk. The gold price can be below the production price for a long, long time.”
“That’s true enough,” I answered.
A biplane pulling a sign flew overhead, casting a long shadow over a hot brunette in a sunflower bikini.
“But still, gold is down 40% from the peak $1,900/ounce it hit in 2011. And nothing has really changed since the crisis. Sure, it’s been papered over with $16 trillion in debt… but that just sows the seeds for the next crisis.”
He nodded slowly. “Just give me the 29 bucks, Chief.”
All the best,
Christian DeHaemer
Check us out on YouTube!Christian is the founder of Bull and Bust Report and an editor at Energy and Capital. For more on Christian, see his editor’s page.
