John Stepek

Have we tipped over?

Is this kind of, you know, 2011, 2012 again?

But I just can't see it.

I mean, one of our colleagues, Simon White, who does the Microscope column, wrote a good piece pointing out that Asian money is still buying.

And that's... And several banks are still buying.

Yeah, I... Not on quite the same scale as they were, but they are still buying.

Yeah.

And so I think a couple of things happened.

There was momentum, obviously.

Everyone got very excited about gold.

Gold was briefly like the new Bitcoin sort of thing.

But also, you know, we kind of had a period of inflations going up and people stopped thinking interest rates were going to go down, started thinking they were going to go back up.

And they haven't got quite as far as remembering that, yeah, well, what if interest rates go up, don't go up fast enough to, you know, stop inflation from taking off.

And again, that's when you want some gold in your portfolio.

So I don't really, and certainly, obviously, the debt picture hasn't got better, particularly not in the US.

So I don't see any fundamental things changing, unlike, you know, arguably they did in 2011, 2012.

Yeah.

So, yeah, basically, I still think it's a bull market.

All the reasons to hold stand.

Yeah.