Buffett on Gold

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce — gold’s price as I write this — its value would be about $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

(Apologies for not crediting where I got this from: feeling tired)

Who Holds The Largest Gold Reserves?

United States – 8,133.5 metric tons

Germany – 3,401.0

International Monetary Fund (IMF) – 2,846.7

Italy – 2,451.8

France – 2,435.4

China – 1,054.1

Switzerland – 1,040.1

Russia – 775.2

Japan – 765.2

Netherlands – 615.5

The Italians and French can issue bonds backed by gold if investors are unhappy with their finances.

More details http://financialedge.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0911/10-Countries-With-The-Largest-Gold-Reserves.aspx?partner=ntu9#axzz1XJX4oAoj

Paulson, Soros selling out of their bets

As of the end of the third quarter, John Paulson had reduced his stake in Bank of America by about 30 million shares, to 137.8 million shares. And he cut his holdings in Citigroup by about 82.7 million shares, to 424 million shares. He had been buying BoA in early 2009 juz when Temasek was cutting its losses, losing in the process “US$4.6 billion loss on a US$5.9 billion dollar investment” according to a CNBC report.

Looks like he is no longer bullish on US banks.

George Soros sold over half of one million shares of  SPDR Gold Trust to finish the quarter with 4.7 million shares. John Paulson maintained a 31.5 million share holding of the exchange traded fund through the quarter.

John Paulson remains bullish on gold while Soros is trimming his stake and laughing all the way to the bank. Remember he called gold a bubble in the making, and jumped into it earlier this year.

Better than gold?

If you believe the gold story but lack the balls to come in at the US$1300 level, why not try silver? The Economist sets out the case.

[S]ilver and gold have much of the same allure. The combination of a weak dollar, low interest rates and economic uncertainty that has convinced some to buy gold and pushed its price up to around $1,300 an ounce has also encouraged them to put their money into other likely-looking stores of value. Silver not only offers investors diversity but it is also supported by real industrial demand.

… 25-30% of gold is bought by investors, only about a tenth of global silver production goes the same way. Roughly half the world’s silver goes to industrial users (the balance is accounted for by jewellery and other silverware), although their identity has undergone a huge shift over the past decade.

Granted film (which uses a lot of silver)-based photography has been made extinct by digital photography but New uses for the metal plugged the gap left by film. Silver is widely used in electronics, whether in buttons for TVs, in membrane switches in computer keyboards or as a coating for CDs and DVDs. But the great hope for silver is the solar-power industry. Photovoltaic cells, the technology used in 70% of solar panels, contain silver. Although other technologies that do not use silver are on the rise, heavy government subsidies are forecast to help keep the solar industry growing.

Demand for silver is likely to keep rising in developing countries in particular: China, which used to export the metal, now imports it. The same cannot be said for supply …  three-quarters of the world’s supply comes as a by-product from copper, lead and zinc mines. So ramping up production is difficult. Total supplies of the metal in 2009, at 27,650 tonnes, were barely higher than in 2004.

But do remember that Warren Buffett has sold off the silver he bot in 2008. He could have some left but the bulk were sold last year.

Related posting

https://atans1.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/equities-and-gold-go-opposite-ways/

Better for gold, worse for stocks

David Ranson of Wainwright Economics:

When gold was up more than 20% over five years, the median return from largecap stocks was 2.1%

When gold was up less than 20%, the median return from stocks was 44.7%

When gold was unchanged, the return was 52%.

When gold fell less than 20%, the return was 68.7%.

When gold fell more than 20%, the median return was 99%.

… the better for gold, the worse for stocks. Which makes the simultaneous strength of gold and equities today look all the odder.

Thanks Buttonwood

Base Metal into Gold: no not Alchemy. It’s all in the Accounting

Here’s an explanation of how accounting turned an investment banking loss of £160m into a profit of £3.65bn. And so made “hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of staff at the state supported Royal Bank of Scotland group (RBS)” eligible “for bonuses totalling about £1.5bn”.

Wow!

The moral of the story: be sceptical, very sceptical of the headline financial numbers. And read the footnotes cynically.