Ma quanto valgono veramente l'oro e l'argento?

La straordinaria corsa dei metalli preziosi, e ancor più, negli ultimi dodici mesi, dell'argento relativamente all'oro, non smette di attirare l'attenzione dei commentatori. In un mare di irrazionalità e di conformismo come sempre si distingue per la sua lucidità l'analisi di Buttonwood: l'oro è visto come un bene rifugio sia nel caso di una crisi di iperinflazione (vista come ineluttabile dai profeti di sventura del debito sovrano dei paesi sviluppati) sia nel caso di uno scenario deflazionistico alimentato da un possibile collasso del sistema bancario.
A differenza degli altri asset le materie prime come l'oro non distribuiscono dividendi e non hanno flussi di cassa: questo rende la loro valutazione molto più difficile di quella di azioni e obbligazioni. Infatti le previsioni oscillano tra scenari superottimisti e superpessimisti:

Standard Chartered says the superbull case is for $4869 an ounce by 2020; Tim Lee of pi Economics, a monetarist, is going for $700 in 12 months' time.
The former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, has thrown his hat in with the sceptics. Writing in the Times on Monday (now behind Mr Murdoch's paywall so no link) under the title "The end of the golden age will soon be with us", he dismissed many of the bullish arguments. On inflation, he said that

Western economies do not have the rigid labour markets and strong trade unions that create a real wage-price spiral.

He added that

The dollar has, admittedly, been falling recently but that means that other currencies - the euro, Swiss francs, sterling, the yen - have been rising. So a second argument of the gold bugs, that the price reflects a general disillusionment with paper currencies, doesn't ring true either.

This doesn't seem a very convincing point. To the extent that the dollar falls, other convertible paper currencies have to rise. By and large, they have all been falling relative to gold; gold was Sfr 1126 an ounce at the start of last year, compared with Sfr 1326 now, a rise in Swiss franc terms of almost 18%. Were we back in the days of the gold standard, when each currency was worth a certain amount of gold, the Swiss franc would have been forced off the standard long ago.


Secondo Buttonwood per valutare l'oro è meglio confrontarlo con le altre materie prime, piuttosto che con le valute. Si scopre così che lo scenario della bolla è meno scontanto di quanto non sembri:


gold, a metal in limited supply, is priced in terms of dollars, a paper currency which can be created at will. So it is probably better to view it against real things that the consumer might have to buy. The two most basic needs are food and energy. So the chart shows gold relative to wheat and relative to oil over the last 25 years. (...)
What it doesn't look like is a bubble like the chart of NASDAQ in 1999 and early 2000. There was a vertical take-off in the gold-oil and gold-wheat ratios as the financial crisis occurred, largely because other commodity prices plunged while gold was fairly stable. But oil and wheat have since rebounded so one could see gold's stability in 2008-2009 as a sign of investor confidence that the authorities would avert a deflationary spiral.