(Yes, it’s 4:30 AM where I am. I found myself wide awake, thinking about gold prices. You got a problem with that?)
In assessing economic prospects since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been two kinds of people:
people who divide people into two kinds and people who don’t inflationistas and deflationistas. The inflationistas look at budget deficits and monetary base, and see severe inflation and soaring interest rates as the obvious outcome; the deflationistas say, hey, we’re in a liquidity trap, so monetary base is sterile and budget deficits are just soaking up some but not all of the world’s excess saving.
I am, of course, a big deflationista, and as I see it record low interest rates strongly vindicate my position. As I like to point out, if you’d believed the inflationistas at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, you would have lost a lot of money.
But what about gold? As some readers and correspondents love to point out, you would have made a lot of money if you’d bought gold early in this mess. So doesn’t that vindicate the inflationistas, to some extent?
My usual response has been that I have no idea what drives the price of gold, to say that it’s a market driven by hoarding in Asia, Glenn Beck followers, whatever. But maybe I’ve been too flip here. Why not think about what actually
should be driving gold prices? And I mean think about it, rather than going for slogans about inflation, debased currencies, and all that.
Well, I’ve been thinking about it — and the answer surprised me: soaring gold prices may be quite consistent with a deflationista story about the economy.
OK, how do we think about gold prices? Well, my starting point is the old but very fine analysis by
Henderson and Salant (pdf), which was actually the inspiration for my first good paper, on currency crises. H-S suggested that we start by modeling gold as an exhaustible resource subject to Hotelling pricing.
Here’s how it works. Imagine that there’s a fixed stock of gold available right now, and that over time this stock gradually disappears into real-world uses like dentistry. (Yes, gold gets mined, and there’s a more or less perpetual demand for gold that just sits there; never mind for now). The rate at which gold disappears into teeth — the flow demand for gold, in tons per year — depends on its real price:
Crucially, at least for tractability, there is a “choke price” — a price at which flow demand goes to zero. As we’ll see next, this price helps tie down the price path.
So what determines the price of gold at any given point in time? Hotelling models say that people are willing to hold onto an exhaustible resources because they are rewarded with a rising price. Abstracting from storage costs, this says that the real price must rise at a rate equal to the real rate of interest, so you get a price path that looks like this:
Obviously there are many such paths. Which one is correct? Given rational expectations (I know, I know) the answer is, the path under which cumulative flow demand on that path, up to the point at which you hit the choke price, is just equal to the initial stock of gold.
Now ask the question, what has changed recently that should affect this equilibrium path? And the answer is obvious: there has been a dramatic plunge in real interest rates, as investors have come to perceive that the Lesser Depression will depress returns on investment for a long time to come:
What effect should a lower real interest rate have on the Hotelling path? The answer is that it should get flatter: investors need less price appreciation to have an incentive to hold gold.
But if the price path is going to be flatter while still leading to consumption of the existing stock — and no more — by the time it hits the choke price, it’s going to have to start from a higher initial level. So the change in the path should look like this:
And this says that the price of gold should jump in the short run.
The logic, if you think about it, is pretty intuitive: with lower interest rates, it makes more sense to hoard gold now and push its actual use further into the future, which means higher prices in the short run and the near future.
But suppose this is the right story, or at least a good part of the story, of gold prices. If so, just about everything you read about what gold prices mean is wrong.
For this is essentially a “real” story about gold, in which the price has risen because expected returns on other investments have fallen; it is not, repeat not, a story about inflation expectations. Not only are surging gold prices not a sign of severe inflation just around the corner, they’re actually the result of a persistently depressed economy stuck in a liquidity trap — an economy that basically faces the threat of Japanese-style deflation, not Weimar-style inflation. So people who bought gold because they believed that inflation was around the corner were right for the wrong reasons.
And if you view the gold story as being basically about real interest rates, something else follows — namely, that having a gold standard right now would be deeply deflationary. The real price of gold “wants” to rise; if you try to peg the nominal price level to gold, that can only happen through severe deflation.
OK, none of this necessarily rejects other hypotheses about gold; in particular, there could be a bubble over and above the Hotelling aspect. But the crucial message is, I think, right: If you believe that gold prices are signaling an inflationary threat, I have to tell you, I do not think that price means what you think it means.
Update: Larry Summers directs me to a
1988 paper he wrote with Robert Barsky (pdf) with a similar theme, although applied to the gold standard era rather than recent events.
