Submitted by John Aziz of Azizonomics blog [13],
China now buys more gold than the Western world:
[14]
Does that mean, as some commentators are suggesting [15], that future price growth for the gold price depends on China? That if the Chinese economy weakens and has a hard landing or a recession that gold will fall steeply?
There’s no doubt that the run-up that gold has experienced in recent years is associated with the rise in demand for gold from emerging markets and their central banks [16]. And indeed, the BRIC central banks have been quite transparent about their gold acquisition and the reasons for it.
Zhang Jianhua of the People’s Bank of China said: [17]
No asset is safe now. The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency — gold.
Indeed, this trend recently led the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard [18] to declare that the world was on the road to “a new gold standard” — a tripartite reserve currency system of gold, dollars and euros:
The world is moving step by step towards a de facto Gold Standard, without any meetings of G20 leaders to announce the idea or bless the project.
Some readers will already have seen the GFMS Gold Survey for 2012 which reported that central banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century.
They added a net 536 tonnes in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen.
The countries driving the movement toward gold as a reserve currency by building their gold reserves is that they are broadly creditor nations whose dollar-denominated assets have been relatively hurt by over a decade of low and negative real interest rates. The idea that gold does well during periods of falling or negative real rates held even before the globalisation of U.S. Treasury debt.
The blue line is real interest rates on the 10-year Treasury, the red line change in the gold price from a year ago:
[19]
The historical relationship between real interest rates and the gold price shows that it is likely not “China” per se that has been driving the gold price so much as creditors and creditor states in genera [20]l who are disappointed or frustrated with the negative real interest rate environment. What a slowdown in the Chinese economy (or indeed the BRICs in general) would mean for the gold price remains to be seen. While it is widely assumed that a Chinese slowdown might reduce demand for gold, it is quite plausible that the opposite could be true. For instance, an inflationary crisis in China could drive the Chinese public and financial into buying more gold to insulate themselves against falling or negative real rates.
Of course, this is only one factor. There are no hard and fast rules about what drives markets, especially markets like the gold market where many different market participants have many different motivations for participating — some see gold as an inflation hedge, some (like the PBOC) as a hedge against counterparty risk [21] and global contagion, some as a buffer against negative real interest rates, some as a tangible form of wealth, etc.
And with the global monetary system in a state of flux — with many nations creating bilateral and multilateral trade agreements to trade in non-dollar currencies, including gold [22] — emerging market central banks see gold — the oldest existing form of money — as an insurance policy against unpredictable changes, and as a way to win global monetary influence.
So while emerging markets and particularly China have certainly been driving gold, while U.S. real interest rates remain negative or very low, and while the global monetary system remains in a state of flux, these nations will likely continue to gradually drive the gold price upward.