Huffington Post Mentions Gold, Through Gold Skeptic

One of the talking points of gold bulls, aimed at dispelling the notion that gold's in a bubble, is the containedness of gold enthusiasm. Despite the entrance of some new gold bugs to the market, all big-money hedge fund operators except for one value investor, the bullishness is still confined to the same old crowd. Penetration of the gold story into mainstream-media outlets is most likely done through a gold skeptic. The latest example: the Huffington Post, where gold is mentioned by blogger and hedge fund managing partner Alan Schram. His attempt at debunking is brief:

In the last 30 years gold has not been a good investment, and substantially lagged both the S&P 500 and Bonds (as measured by the Merrill Lynch Bond index).

While gold may reduce your anxieties, it is an unassailable fact that gold (and oil) are not actually effective hedges against loss of purchasing power, and could lag inflation for decades. And gold is not a good insurance policy either. When the world's financial system was on the precipice in 2008, gold did not prove to be a particularly good hiding place.

Later in the post, he also mentions that GDP growth doesn't correlate well to stock-market returns. He ends, though, with the usual gold-skeptic mantra about gold having no intrinsic value.


As of the time of this post here, there were only three comments on Schram's own post; one of them was a correction to an earlier comment. A popular item at the Huffington Post often generates hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of comments. There's evidently not much interest in the gold story, either way, at HuffPo.