Financial Sense Newshour Shows A Little Nervousness

When gold was brought up on the Financial Sense Newshour podcast this week, the permabullishness was still there but it was overlaid with some nervousness. Metals expert John Doody affirmed that gold would be up for the tenth straight year in 2010, but there was more than the usual talk about how risky and volatile gold can be. I could just be inferring, but last week's drops seem to have left the hosts a little spooked.


On that line, a Commodity Online article linked to at LewRockwell.com asks "Is gold price set for crash below $1,000?" The featured expert is Mark Robinson, a bullion analyst in Dubai. He says:

“Gold is on a bearish mood these days after the precious metal’s spectacular ascent to the record high of $1,227 per ounce in November last year. Gold price may not boom above $1,227 this year, if commodities get into a slump in 2010. A crash in gold price below $1,000 per ounce can not be ruled out,”...

According to Robinson, the main problem with gold is that “its price has been over-hyped by some bullion analysts and forecasters.” “It is funny to see so many gold predictions going around in the search engines on the Internet. Gold price is being predicted from $1,000 per ounce up to a whopping $5,000 and even $10,000 by analysts and investors ranging from Jim Rogers, Marc Faber and Nouriel Roubini to research assistants in small broking firms,” Robinson told Commodity Online.

Note the tone he takes in the second excerpted paragraph. It's not unlike the remonstrances heard during a mature bear market. How hype-blind we were, how blind...

[If you're interested, Robinson - who is a believer in gold - has three bear points which are on p. 2 of the article.]


Evidently, $1090 is a very watched number. As gold scrapes around it, and approaches the December London-fix low of $1,080, more and more gold bulls are getting skittish. Right now, sentiment isn't exactly sanguine.

This nervousness can serve as a contrary indicator. So far, anyway, there hasn't been any real capitulation in the gold marketplace itself. But it's clear that the People's Bank of China, not to mention President Obama, have succeeded in putting the fear of the bear in at least a few goldbugs. The clout of the former, particularly, might be what's engendering the anxiousness; the PBoC, through its tightening-oriented announcements, managed to derail a nice recovery that took gold above $1,160 as of January 11th. Right now, it's the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room.