When and Why Do Gold Prices Drop?

Investing

The Significance of Changes in the Gold Price

If you’ve ever been exposed to even one commercial on a financial TV network, you’ve been told that gold was, is, and forever will be, the greatest investment of all time, considering its retention of value, millennia-long history, scarcity, and other reasons.

However, the companies selling gold will gladly take your cash in exchange for it, which ought to tell you something about gold’s short-term prognosis and the likelihood of imminent inflation.

Key Takeaways

  • While gold is often seen as a safe haven investment and store of value, it is also a produced commodity and subject to those same economic forces.
  • When gold miners produce an excess of gold relative to demand, the price will experience downward pressure due to the laws of economics.
  • Speculators that accumulate or let go of gold in the market can create temporary imbalances that lead to rapid price changes.

Understanding Gold Prices

A permanent bull market for gold is impossible. If the price of gold had risen consistently and measurably in value since the days of Tutankhamun, its price would now be infinite. The metal’s price clearly rises and falls daily, so what makes one day’s supply and demand curves intersect at one price, and the next day, at another?

Surge in Supply

The supply of gold is largely static from one period to the next. Gold mines are large and plentiful, but almost the entirety of what they produce is wasted. As technology improves, ore with lower concentrations of gold becomes more economically feasible to mine. Discard all the billions of tons of worthless ground rock and it has been estimated that all the gold discovered thus far would fit in a cube that is 28 meters wide on every side.

As a long-standing commodity, gold is not a security for the speculative. No one, or at least no one sane, buys physical gold in the hope that it will sextuple in value over the next year. Instead, buying gold is a defensive measure: a guard against inflation, currency devaluation, the failure of less tangible assets, and other woes.

Unlike many other commodities—light sweet crude oil, ethanol, cotton—precious metals differ in that, for the most part, they are not consumed. Less than 10% of gold is mined for industrial purposes (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis drugs and dental bridges), leaving the rest to be held and later sold at the buyer’s will, whether in bullion, coin, or jewelry form. Fundamentally, the total supply of gold is more or less static.

In 2009, Aaron Regent, then president of Barrick Gold Corporation, the world’s second-largest gold producer, stated that gold production had peaked at the turn of the millennium and would continue to fall. And prices did indeed correspondingly rise till late 2011. In fact, they doubled. Yet, in today’s prices, they’ve since lost 15% since that all-time zenith.

Gold’s most pronounced price fall in the past decade happened between October of 2012 and July of 2013, nine months during which the metal lost over a quarter of its value. The price continued to fall to a low of $1,054 per ounce in December 2015 before rebounding. As of March 2021, the price was $1,726 per ounce. Classical economic theory would blame a bear market on either an increase in supply, which we’ve already determined is unlikely, or a decrease in demand.

Market Conditions

Speculation is one reason for changes in gold prices. Investors speculate as to what governments and central banks are going to do and then act accordingly. Gold prices dropped when the Federal Reserve announced in 2014 it was wrapping up its controversial stimulus program after the financial crisis of 2008.

That announcement, coupled with the preternaturally low inflation rates of the time, rendered gold’s role as a hedge against rising price levels moot. Throw a red-hot stock market into the mix, and the temptation for increasing returns as contrasted with maintaining one’s store of value becomes too great. Why sit on the sidelines with an inert shiny metal when other investors are getting at least temporarily rich?

In the late 1990s, gold was hovering in the $270 range. That’s per ounce, not per milligram. The people shrewd and patient enough to have held onto their gold stashes throughout terrorism, war, prolonged recession(s), and other assorted global upheaval are justifiably proud—and probably still not selling—particularly when you consider that worldwide economic and political distress are often the norm, not the exception.

Special Considerations

It’s tempting to think that gold represents an objective, unswayable measure of wealth, particularly given the metal’s role as an investment throughout the course of civilization. However, it is not. Gold’s value rises and falls just like any other investment. While gold will almost certainly never gain nor lose relative value as quickly as penny stocks and dot-com initial public offerings, gold’s price movements can still convey information.

That information reflects investor confidence, the probability of stock price and currency increases, and more. A wise investor is one who recognizes gold’s place in the market, without attaching too much or too little significance to it.

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