Gold Prices at Record Levels: Should You Invest?
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Should you add gold to your portfolio right now?
Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, December 8th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Should you add gold to your portfolio? Prices of the precious metal hit a series of record levels this year.
Gold is seen as what they call a safe haven asset, which means when people are worried about the economy or some event happens in the world that gets them nervous, then they tend to turn to gold.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal markets reporter Bob Henderson after the break.
The price of gold has hit several all-time highs recently, up about 11% this year. Wall Street Journal markets reporter Bob Henderson joins me. So, Bob, what has propelled the price of gold to these high levels?
Most recently, it's been all about interest rates and all about expectations about what the Federal Reserve will do with regard to cutting rates. The 11% that gold has gone up, I mean, it's oscillated a lot during the course of the And what's happened in November is that people have become a lot more optimistic about the idea that the Fed is going to, first of all, stop raising rates as they have over the last year and a half and start cutting them sooner next year than people had expected. And that's been a big boost to gold prices.
Now that's also sparked a rally in stocks and bond prices. So what's the connection there?
Lower interest rates for all investments in a way are better because investments in stocks and bonds tend to entail paying now to receive some kind of income or some kind of value in the future. And lower rates means that value is worth more today than when rates are higher. When it comes to gold, it's an extreme case of that story in that when interest rates come down, It's not as though it's making gold better in any sense. It's more like it's making it less worse. It's the fact that gold doesn't pay any interest at all, doesn't pay any dividends, whereas stocks and bonds do. The alternative to gold might be cash or it might be bonds. And if you're earning less interest on those, then gold, by comparison, the opportunity cost is less.
That's a force that pushes buying in gold.
So it's a place of safety for investors and their money?
Yeah, exactly. It's safe, but it doesn't give you earnings. It's not giving you dividends. It's not giving you interest. It's a rock that's historically is kind of a do no harm. It's a place where you can go. It's always been there. It's always going to be there. And it just looks less worse by comparison to other assets as interest rates come down.
What other factors can cause gold prices to move up and down?
Gold tends to increase in value when bad things are happening in the economy, when there's stress, when there's geopolitical tensions. When Hamas attacked Israel in early October, gold jumped and it went from $1,800-ish an ounce to about $2,000 an ounce over the following weeks after that. So that's an example.
And the unsettling events around the world, that's gone back a couple of years when you think about Russia going into Ukraine.
And similarly, gold spiked then, and it spiked during the pandemic as well. You could look at the chart of gold, and wherever you see a spike, you can just look up the newspaper headlines for the days around that time, and you're going to see a lot of things happening. Gold is seen as what they call a safe haven asset, which means when people are worried about the economy or some event happens in the world that gets them nervous, then they tend to turn to gold.
By the way, when we talk about investing in gold, does that mean buying gold bars?
It can. You could buy gold bars. You can buy coins from the U.S. Mint. They're called American Eagles, and they come in one ounce and smaller denominations. But that has its problems. You have to transport them. You have to store them. You have to hope that they don't get stolen. So more often than not, there are what I would say are better ways. You can buy exchange-traded funds that hold physical gold for you.
What recent market developments pushed gold prices to record highs?
The biggest one is the Spider Gold Shares Fund.
How about investments that are related to gold?
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