From David Rosenberg, and verbatim agreement with what Zero Hedge has been discussing for almost one year. Also, even with gold down, note the price action in PHYS.



Here’s the deal on gold. When we had the post-Lehman collapse, gold fell from $900 to $720 an ounce but it still managed to outperform other commodities and rise in many other currencies, outside the U.S. dollar. That post-Lehman collapse phase was a giant margin call where investors sold their winners, like precious metals, and on top that, there was insatiable appetite for dollars from the global banking system caught short of greenbacks.

What is happening today is truly fascinating. Gold has broken out to the upside even as the U.S. dollar has done likewise on the back of a renewed flight-to-safety bid. What this means, of course, is that gold has managed to hit new highs even as, (i) the U.S. dollar has risen, which means gold is breaking out against all major currencies; and, (ii) other industrial commodities, such as oil and copper, have slumped from their recent highs. So what this all means is that gold is no longer being considered as part of a resource complex that is outperforming the segment but is increasingly being viewed as a currency of its own.

Moreover, with the growth rate of fiat currencies globally being met with a skeptical eye by investors, especially now that we know that if the ECB, of all central banks, can engage in debt monetization (those clinging to the belief that this was modeled after the Bundesbank have been clearly duped), the one thing we do know about gold is that most of it is already above ground and that production peaked a decade ago. In other words, investors have more faith in what the shape and direction of the supply curve for bullion looks like relative to individual country money supply growth. This is why deflation is good for gold — the reflationary efforts provide a big boost. Even without the interventionist efforts to monetize the debts, as long as policy rates are near-zero, gold leasing rates will do likewise.

While FDR fixed the dollar price of gold in the 1930s, we know that bullion doubled in Sterling terms during that deflationary cycle. Gold is a hedge against instability of all kinds — don’t think for a second that deflation does not engender instability whether it be financial, economic or political. To be sure, gold is also a hedge against inflation — but that is going to come much, much later and will be the icing on the cake.

While I am concerned near-term that gold is overbought and could be ripe for a setback; however, unlike the equity market, bullion is in a secular bull market, which means dips, when they occur, are to be bought. Gold can trade down to $1,130 an ounce and none of the trendlines would be broken.

More to the point, secular bull markets usually end in parabolic blowoffs and we are nowhere near that point — see the chart below for what long-term trough/peak moves across different asset classes looked like in the past and tell us that gold is now in a bubble. Not a chance. And, as we have said in the past, if central banks were to ever be compelled to hold the same share of gold in reserves to back up their respective monetary aggregates, the gold price would rise to $3,000 an ounce.

Believe it or not, $3000 an ounce on gold may yet prove to be a conservative forecast. If the gold price to world GDP ratio were to ever scale up to the peak three decades ago, it would imply an ultimate peak of $5,300 an ounce. Even better if the relationship between gold and the M3 money measure where to revert to the 1990 high, gold would move to $5,700 an ounce. A more cautious projection would merely put gold on the same footing as the CPI, and heading back to the previous peaks in this ratio would suggest $2,300 as the peak in gold — only a double from here. Or perhaps the gold price-M1 ratio is one that should be considered and even here gold would go to $3,100 per ounce under the proviso that prior highs get reestablished. For more on this fun-with-figures analysis of how far gold can go, see Why We May See Gold Hit $5,000 on page B2 of the NYT.