Reflections on the Role of Gold in Investment Practice

In a speech to to the 1st Gold Conference in Zurich, Tony Deden explains his use of gold for capital preservation:

In capital preservation, the problem we face is that we own a fixed amount of money capital – while the central bank produces, at virtually no cost, increasing amounts of the same thing, and in so doing, it reduces the value of what we have saved. On a compounded basis, after only a short period of time, we become impoverished.
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Over the ensuing years, in the aftermath of the great Greenspan liquidity of the Y2K scam and the momentous money creation that followed 9/11, it became clear that

• (a) the dollar, as a reserve currency would eventually have to be re-examined,
• (b) the financial situation in the US would deteriorate rapidly,
• (c) the gap between mine supply and traditional demand was growing and
• (d) central banks had become large speculators in the gold markets via the leasing mechanism.

It was only appropriate to re-consider my ownership in gold, not merely as an investment, but also as an insurance policy against a monetary collapse, a crisis in the payment system or a geopolitical conflict. I saw gold ownership increasingly as insurance rather than as an investment.
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I now view gold not merely as insurance, but indeed as cash substitute. More than 45% of our net assets are in precious metals. Holding paper cash subjects me to credit risk, counterparty risk, foreign exchange risk, political and inflation risk. I can avoid most, if not all these, by substituting with gold. It simply means that I trust nominal money less and less.
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Frankly, we now have two generations of economic agents who are entirely ignorant about the nature of money. We welcome rising prices and see them as wealth even as they are merely the result of inflation. We demand more cash to save the system, instead of allowing those who fail to go bankrupt, so that more efficient competitors can emerge. We have tolerated the Swiss National Bank sale of our gold reserves in exchange for American paper money and promises.

We demand cheaper currency to stay competitive because we do not know the true nature of competitiveness. If cheaper currency is the source of wealth, where has Bangladesh gone wrong? If cheaper money means economic prosperity, why not just print as much as we can and give it out to everyone? We have become fools. The customers know nothing and the advisers know even less. And then we have the idiot economists—the neo-classical, Keynesian variety with solutions to problems they did not even anticipate; solutions that have, in fact, long been discredited. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis—eating our meager capital in the hopes of becoming rich in money. It’s a pity.

Read the full speech.