For now I would prefer to bet on gold’s diversifying properties rather than political stability” – Russ Koesterich, Blackrock.
Not for the first time this year, Blackrock’s Koesterich has spoken about his faith in gold during times of both financial and political instability.
Those times are now, the world’s largest money manager believes. Since the beginning of the year Koestrich has been adding to the gold position of the $39 billion Global Allocation Fund. Gold is now the fund’s second-largest position.
Gold’s performance, up 12% year-to-date, is particularly interesting. A hard-to-define asset, gold is often thought to perform best when either inflation and/or volatility is rising. This year has been notable for both falling inflation and record low volatility, raising the question: What is powering gold’s ascent and can it continue? Two trends stand out:
Real rates have flattened out
Political uncertainty has risen
Real rates – plateauing and boosting gold
Gold is most correlated with real interest rates (in other words, the interest rate after inflation), not nominal rates or inflation. While real rates rose sharply during the back half of 2016, the trend came to an abrupt halt in early 2017. U.S.10-year real rates ended July exactly where they began the year, at 0.47%. The plateauing in real yields has taken pressure off of gold, which struggled in the post-election euphoria.
Heightened political uncertainty
Koesterich said earlier this month that, “There has been a Pavlovian response by investors to disregard any piece of bad news or any spike in volatility, and that has been a very profitable strategy but we do think that there are risks in the world that are not being priced in.”
Currently there is heightened geopolitical risk across the world, with a focus on how the US will manage. Investors will no doubt be looking to reduce their risk exposure as events unfold between the US and North Korea as well as Venezuela’s chaos which shows no sign of dissipating.
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