Chapter 1: What economic factors are influencing the rise of gold?
On the program today, macroeconomics in two flavors, gold and AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizal. It is Monday today. This one is the 26th of January. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. We are going to begin today with a story that's not really about the story that you think is going to be the story. I know, but stick with me.
I'll go slow. Gold has been, and there's really no other word for it, simply soaring. Futures topped $5,000 an ounce over the weekend, first time that has ever happened. And $5,000 and change per troy ounce is almost twice what gold was just a year ago. And that's been happening. And here's the twist.
As it's been happening, gold has started to displace dollar-denominated assets in the holdings of central banks around the world. Reuters reports gold now slightly outvalues treasury bonds in those holdings. And data from the IMF shows U.S.
dollar assets now account for less than half of those holdings in absolute terms, even as gold has risen sharply to make up around 28 percent of those holdings. That is exactly what you might expect to see happen if the U.S. dollar were losing its appeal as a safe haven go-to. Marketplace and Mitchell Hartman gets us going.
Gold has been edging ever higher partly because investor stress has, says Samir Samana at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
There's just a very high level of angst about all the things that are going on in the world.
tariffs and trade wars, geopolitical tensions in oil-producing regions, rising government debt across everywhere.
I think a lot of investors are looking for a port in the storm, an investment that's outside financial assets, right, which tend to be things like stocks and bonds. Gold is one of the things they see as being money good.
Foreign central banks have been buying up gold, too. That's partly a defensive move. A hostile government can slap on sanctions, but it can't seize gold out of another country's vaults. The trend took off after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This rise of gold in central bank holdings doesn't necessarily imply they're selling off U.S. dollars and treasuries, says Jennifer Lee at Bank of Montreal.
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Chapter 2: How is AI contributing to economic growth in the U.S.?
I saw that they weren't socializing as much, and I saw that they had more anxiety. Now, she's contending with a new disruption. One day, I turned on my computer, and there was ChatGPT available on the dashboard for free. Last year, the Cal State system made a $17 million deal with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT to half a million students and faculty, whether they want it or not.
We're being told if you don't teach these kids this technology, it's just going to be another way that everything's working against them succeeding. But Baxter-Rice is already noticing unsettling effects. Students cheating on papers, of course, but also a sense that people on campus are struggling psychologically with the new technology. I'm concerned. I'm really scared.
What's happened to young people over the past 15 years is... is scary enough, and then adding this technology to the conversation is really frightening. The tech industry is racing toward a future that doesn't sound great to a lot of people. Recent data from the Pew Research Center show Americans are much more concerned than excited about AI.
And in communities across the country, data centers have become a lightning rod. Local opposition has already shut down dozens of projects. Residents in Hobart, Indiana, outside Chicago, have been protesting a proposed Amazon AI data center for months. I got in touch with a couple of the organizers.
Angelita Soriano lives across the street from the 700-acre site, and Barbara Koteles lives about a quarter mile away. They've been distributing yard signs, going door-to-door, even sponsored a billboard at a busy intersection in town.
It's definitely uniting people together, regardless of... party lines for sure.
I'm a Republican, and I've met many nice Democrats doing this. It's a quality of life issue, really.
They worry about noise, pollution, traffic, declining property values, and strain on the power grid. Electricity prices in the area have already gone up an average of 26 percent in the last year, and they doubt the benefits of AI will make up for it.
It's kind of being like forced down our throats that I open Google, there goes automatically AI. I open a Microsoft Word on my computer.
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