Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Three Questions About Global Natural Resources

Commodities / Resources Investing Jun 06, 2011 - 03:24 PM GMT

By: Frank_Holmes

Commodities

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleFrank Holmes and the co-managers of the U.S. Global Investors Global Resources Fund (PSPFX), Evan Smith and Brian Hicks, participated in a special webcast for the Peak Advisor Alliance last week. Here are some candid portions of the Q&A:


Q. How are interest rates currently affecting commodity prices?

A. The magic number for real interest rates is 2 percent. That’s when you can earn more than 2 percent on a U.S. Treasury bill after discounting for inflation. Our research has shown that commodities tend to perform well when rates fall below 2 percent.

Take gold and silver, for example. You can see from this chart that gold and silver have historically appreciated when the real interest rate dips below 2 percent. Additionally, the lower real interest rates drop, the stronger the returns tend to be for gold. On the other hand, once real interest rates rise above the 2 percent mark, you start to see negative year-over-year returns for both gold and silver.

Whether you are Republican, Democrat, Independent or Agnostic, it’s important to realize that it’s not about politics, but about policies. During the 1990s when President Clinton was in office, there was a budget surplus and investors could earn more on Treasury bills (about 3 percent) than the inflationary rate (about 2). This gave investors little incentive to embrace commodities such as gold, and prices hovered around $250 an ounce. Now under President Obama, there is a large budget deficit and we have negative real interest rates, and gold is in great demand.

Interest rates in the U.S. have been near zero since 2008 and we don’t see the Federal Reserve increasing them until at least 2012. The U.S. economy remains in intensive care: Stimulus efforts have been unable to stimulate significant job growth and unemployment remains near 10 percent. In addition, the existing home sales figures released last week reminded everyone that housing is still on life support.

Even though there has been a lot of talk about reducing deficit spending and the U.S. House of Representatives voted against raising the debt ceiling this week, we don’t see any desire from the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. The government realizes it is extremely dangerous to pull back the reins right now.

Q. How do the financial troubles of European countries such as Greece and Portugal affect gold prices?

A. The market has definitely been more volatile as some of the financial problems started to pop up again in Europe. The re-emergence of these issues is just another example of how many developed economies around the world are overleveraged and heavily burdened by their debt.

Some of the weaker countries, particularly Greece, could end up ditching the euro as their main currency. This would obviously be a destabilizing event for the euro and would result in some short-term strength for the U.S. dollar, thus providing a headwind for commodities. However, the U.S. dollar is plagued by the same problems as the eurozone; i.e., a weak economy and higher unemployment.

Meanwhile, central bankers in emerging markets have excess reserves and are looking for ways to diversify away from these paper currencies. To protect themselves from paper currency devaluation many of them have turned to gold. Last year was the first net positive year for central banks’ buying of gold since 1985. They’ve chosen to own gold over trying to guess whether Portugal or Greece’s debt is the best investment.

This isn’t a completely new phenomenon. Russia announced that it was going to diversify roughly 5 percent of its reserves into gold back in 2005 when gold prices were at $500 an ounce. The tipping point came in 2009 when India purchased 200 tons of gold from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which effectively set a floor under gold prices at $1,000.

Since then, we’ve seen countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Venezuela and the Philippines add to their official gold reserves. Earlier this year, Mexico purchased 100 tons of gold to boost its reserve holdings.

This trend should continue.

Q. With oil prices hovering around $100 per barrel, what is the outlook for oil prices for the next two to five years?

A. We remain bullish on crude oil for one simple, fundamental reason: Demand is greater than supply. We don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.

One big driver is a rapidly growing demand for cars and automobiles in emerging markets (Read: Booming Global Auto Market Good for Many). There’s also rising demand for oil due to urbanization and rising per capita incomes in emerging economies. As their economies grow and their populations become more prosperous, they want and can afford to upgrade infrastructure and other construction projects which require oil to be produced (Read: Why Asia is the Epicenter of Oil Demand Growth).

However, it is important to manage expectations. As the price of gasoline rises and inflation fears grow, countries such as India have been forced to lower government fuel subsidies. This will cause some demand destruction as consumers adjust to paying more at the pump, a situation not very different from what we’ve seen recently in the U.S. Though it has the potential to spread if inflation gets out of control, we think this dip in demand will only be temporary.

On the supply side, it’s getting more difficult to find new supply and even when large reserves are discovered, they lie deep beneath the ocean floor or in parts of the world where it’s dangerous to operate (Read: Why High Oil Prices Are Likely Here to Stay).
We think these trends appear to be firmly intact and are why we remain constructive on crude oil prices over the next several years.

Want to receive commentary from Frank and analysis from the rest of the U.S. Global Investors team delivered to your inbox every Friday? Sign up to receive our weekly Investor Alert at www.usfunds.com.

For more updates on global investing from Frank and the rest of the U.S. Global Investors team, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/USFunds or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/USFunds. You can also watch exclusive videos on what our research overseas has turned up on our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/USFunds.

Please consider carefully the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and other important information, obtain a fund prospectus by visiting www.usfunds.com or by calling 1-800-US-FUNDS (1-800-873-8637). Read it carefully before investing. Distributed by U.S. Global Brokerage, Inc.

Standard deviation is a measure of the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Standard deviation is also known as historical volatility. All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every investor. The S&P 500 Stock Index is a widely recognized capitalization-weighted index of 500 common stock prices in U.S. companies. The NYSE Arca Gold BUGS (Basket of Unhedged Gold Stocks) Index (HUI) is a modified equal dollar weighted index of companies involved in gold mining. The HUI Index was designed to provide significant exposure to near term movements in gold prices by including companies that do not hedge their gold production beyond 1.5 years. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index is a free float-adjusted market capitalization index that is designed to measure equity market performance in the global emerging markets. The U.S. Trade Weighted Dollar Index provides a general indication of the international value of the U.S. dollar.

Frank Holmes Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in