Gold prices hit a new record high yesterday afternoon, with its spot price of $2,531.60 (£1,943.83) an ounce up 1% on the day. This means that a standard bar of gold — weighing in at 400 troy ounces (12.4kg) — is now worth more than $1 million. While this is a somewhat arbitrary milestone, it reflects very deep changes in the gold market.
In the early Seventies, when the US dollar was taken off the gold standard, the precious metal was trading at just over $100 an ounce. At the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, amid soaring inflation, there was a spike in the price of gold, which reached over $820 an ounce in late 1980. While the price came down shortly after this, it remained above its Seventies levels, hovering around $300-$400 until the mid-2000s.
It was after the 2008 financial crisis, when central banks turned to quantitative easing (QE), that gold prices began to rally in earnest. Gold first broke the $1,800-an-ounce mark towards the end of 2011 when the Eurozone was experiencing a sovereign debt crisis and the QE programs were in full swing. In the post-2008 world, gold became anchored to inflation expectations, tracking yields on inflation-protected Treasuries (TIPS). Gold prices in the period reflected where investors thought inflation was headed.
But the recent explosion in gold prices appears to have little to do with inflation forecasting. Indeed, we first saw a run-up in the gold price as inflation was rising and now the value continues to increase even though inflation is widely thought to be falling and central banks are considering easing. This suggests that gold has become untethered to inflation expectations, and that something or someone else is driving the price.
That something or someone appears to be central banks, which are buying gold at a record pace. The main buyers are the Chinese, Indian and Turkish central banks, yet Russia anticipated this trend a decade ago. Moscow went through two phases of buying gold, first in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In the first quarter of that year, the Russian central bank held around 457 tonnes of gold; by 2014, this had risen to 1,040 tonnes.
But it was after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, which precipitated the first wave of sanctions on the country, that Russian gold-buying really started. By the first quarter of 2020, Russian gold reserves had risen to 2,300 tonnes; having purchased around 97 tonnes a year in its initial phase of gold buying, in its second the country was buying around 210 tonnes a year.
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