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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alex who wrote (33018)	5/2/1999 8:46:00 AM
From: Bill Murphy	Respond to of 116791

Some feedback for you Alex, Bill, In my weekend reading I came across an interesting op-ed piece in today's (May 1, 1999) Globe and Mail by Donald Coxe, who is a well-known market commentator in Canada and whom I believe is the chief mutual fund strategist for the Bank of Montreal/Harris Bank/Jones Heward and affiliated companies. I will directly quote three paragraphs from the piece, which is entitled "Is the world safe at last for commodity investors?": Apart from guilt by association, the precious metals stocks haven't benefited much from this resource rally. Reason: The same political leaders who got the West into a war that promises to be costly, messy and long - after promising us it would be cheap, civilized and short - have announced that the International Monetary Fund should sell bullion from its gold hoard to pay off debts from bankrupt nations. This strategy is being pushed piously, with the backing of the Pope. It may be motivated cynically, with the backing of shrewd ex-trader, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Announcements of monster pending sales naturally drive down prices of the merchandise to be dumped. Since gold has been a reliable inflation indicator for at least four millennia, weakening its price at a time of soaring oil prices is politically smart. It will help convince economists and central bankers that disinflation or even deflation is still at work, despite rapid money supply growth and some of the lowest interest rates the world has seen. Bill, what is interesting that these views are expressed by a well-known market commentator who is the chief strategist for one of the Big Five chartered banks, in the more established and important of the two English-language national newspapers. Although I believe that Coxe has always been a bit of a goldbug (caveat: I've only been investing and following the business press for about a year and a half), I believe this piece suggests that the "gold manipulation theory" is now arguably mainstream, at least in Canada. (Coxe also repeated the "gold manipulation theory" in a taped conference call on the Jones Heward website). In any event, I thought you would find this interesting. Yours truly, Glen.