Latest Spread Of The Gold Meme: Global Pensions

Gold as an alterative investment got a write-up in Global Pensions Online, with this selling point:

“If you look at the investment markets between 2000 and 2007 then markets were great,” said World Gold Council managing director – investment, Jason Toussaint. “We had risky assets like emerging markets making big returns and this lulled investors into a false sense of security as they thought this would continue. When the downturn came in 2008 investors realised that what they thought were diversified portfolios actually weren’t. Despite these issues gold was still one of the few positively generating asset classes in 2008 and so its role as a portfolio diversifier is key

Although pension funds in general are only tiptoeing in, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas has launched the Global Best Ideas (GBI) Gold Fund, which secured about $250 million's worth of assets. That fund invests in mining stocks as well as gold itself.

The article does contain a cautionary balancing quote which notes gold's expensiveness right now, but it does make a case for gold as a hedging asset. The above-quoted selling point has a resonance that might well see it spread further.