INTERVIEW: John Hathaway, Tocqueville Gold Fund
mips1.net
<<...On Iraq – I think it’s a diversion from the point of view of the gold investor. I don’t think that’s why gold is going up. I suppose gold would go up if we had open hostilities there. But it certainly is not central to my thesis in any event. It’s my view that there is a surplus of dollars all over the world, the dollar is in my opinion over-valued, it’s over-owned. We have a huge trade deficit. We also were beginning to have a lot of deficit spending in this country. It’s the highest level it’s been in a couple of decades. So the issuance of dollars continues to be very, very high. And, at some point, foreign investors, in particular, who hold a huge amount of bond market, stock market and corporate bond market, may begin to question the attractiveness of those assets. Certainly, after three bad years in the stock market, you are already seeing that sort of thing take place. And when that sort of exodus starts to pick up any sort of momentum, the dollar will lose exchange value and that could be a self-eating process. When you look at the alternatives, the euro and the yen, in terms of big liquid currencies, there’s not a whole lot to get too excited about. In fact they have issues in each case. So, at some point, that outflow from the dollar will find its way into gold and the amount of flows relative to the liquidity of the gold market are enormous, and that’s why I think we could see a substantially higher gold price...>>
<<...Deflation is definitely the concern. There’s too much debt, and in a really deflationary spiral people have to sell good assets to service their debt. And that’s what the policymakers around the world are afraid of. The scarier it gets, and I have to say, it’s getting fairly scary, the more they will resort to measures that would ultimately be very inflationary. So I’ve always thought that deflationary pressures beget or spawn inflationary policy measures. And it’s that sort of thing that will scare people into gold...>> |
