Gold has had some reputational issues since reaching a record high in 2011. The thesis at the time was that a massive expansion of the money supply via the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program would spark hyper-inflation, making hard assets more attractive than financial assets. Hyper-inflation never came to pass, which helps to explain why the price of gold tumbled almost 50% over the following four years.
We still don’t have very much inflation, and yet there is renewed interest in gold with prices reaching their highest since early 2013 at about $1,440 an ounce. There are a lot of reasons to like gold. One is that gold tracks fairly closely with budget deficits. The highs of 2009-2011 roughly corresponded with the large deficits that reached 10% of GDP during the Obama administration, which included the stimulus spending during the Great Recession and a sharp depreciation in the value of the dollar.
