Chris Martenson

Is Gold In A Bull Market?

Friday, May 28, 2010

Executive Summary

• Asking whether gold is in a bubble or a bull/bear market misses the point.
• Better questions to ask involve fiat money management, government responses, and financial market risk.
• Gold is not in a bull market; rather, faith in our decision-makers is in a bear market.
• Trust is hard to come by these days. 
• As for whether or not to buy gold, there are a number of factors to consider.

I’d like to clarify my views on gold, because I approach this topic from a unique perspective that I think has value.

For most, the idea of investing, or even speculating, is a matter of placing one’s money somewhere with the anticipation of getting more money back out at a later date.  Naturally, the footnote to this expectation reads, “…assuming money is worth the same.”  In this idea of investing, ‘more money’ is assumed to be synonymous with ‘greater purchasing power,’ because devalued money may represent a significant loss.  The shifting target in this story since 1971 has been the untethered value of the currency itself.

For many investors, it has been a useful frame of reference to define various asset classes and markets in terms of being either “bull” or “bear” markets, where prices for investments have risen or fallen over some period of time, respectively.

Sometimes, when a bull market ramps out of control and then crashes, it is said to have been in a “bubble.”

Recently, the WSJ asked the question of whether or not gold is in a bubble, which is an important distinction for many investors, because if the answer is “yes,” then the next question is, “So when will it crash?”

Well, we are getting our second taste of a multi-day power outage for the second time in a month, and this one may last for the better part of a week.  We had a ripper of a thunderstorm come across the entire region on Wednesday.  The power company is saying that the damage is worse than last year’s ice storm, which was the most destructive event in their history at that point.

We’ve got some amazing damage up here.  One lady in town had a string of 5 trees all get ripped up and pushed over, and now she has a literal wall of roots 50′ long and 15′ high, dead vertical, right where her shady backyard used to be.

So score another one for harsh weather.

Right now the power suppliers are on full triage and are focusing on getting power back to hospitals and emergency services, then grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. etc. etc., until they finally get to residences – and even then, they’ll go for higher-density areas first.

Today the Dow closed below 10,000 for the first time since February 10, when it finished at 9,908.  Trying to figure out which way this thing is headed has proven difficult.

Such high volatility is often a feature of tops and bottoms.

Again we find that the markets were trading as the inverse of the dollar, which had another strong day.

Money sloshed this way and that way.  Etcetera and so forth.

I don’t necessarily want to diminish the psychological importance of closing below a ‘big round number,’ but it hardly has any real significance at all.

The real problems remain firmly in my view.

There are four truisms that form the core of my near-to-intermediate-term outlook:

I’ve been struggling lately with balancing my role as a responsible information scout and commentator on the current economic situation with this sinking feeling that I’ve been carrying for awhile.  There have been a couple of times in the past where I’ve had a similar sense of apprehension.

One was in the Fall of 2008, when I sent out an Alert advising people to take cash out of the bank due to my fears of an imminent banking holiday.  A bank holiday never happened, but a year after my Alert, we learned from Hank Paulson and Mervyn King that we were literally hours away from a full blown banking melt-down at the exact time I sent out the Alert.

The mechanism by which my ‘spidey-senses’ get triggered is largely based on data and evidence, but there’s also a component to it that I cannot fully describe.  Mainly I am watching the news with incredible attention, trying to note both what is being said and what is being left out.  Looking for the ‘negative space’ takes a lot of attention, experience, and good old-fashioned thinking.  And I am glued to the markets, looking for changes in old patterns, trying to see the first signs of stress before they become common knowledge.

Based on widening credit spreads, a still-unexplained market glitch, a blow-out eco-disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, an already-failed trillion-dollar euro bailout that really wasn’t (vaporware, as Machinehead puts it), and the inexorable rise in gold, I come to the simple conclusion that these data points reveal a loss of faith in both our markets and our economic prospects.

Well, if you are running a Ponzi system, there is nothing more important than faith.  Which is why I spend so much time trying to gauge the winds of confidence as they swirl and eddy about.

I’m about as worried as I’ve ever been.