I was talking to Alex Stanczyk of Anglo Far-East this morning and he said that when he read Ben Hunt's work on narrative it hit him like a brick, being so relevant to gold. He and I agree that gold is very much a narrative driven market, a
pure epsilon asset. Others however react negatively to this idea, feeling it is mumbo-jumbo.
The reason I think is because many can't handle ambiguity or the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time(
1). In an uncertain world, in a complex world where hyper-specialisation means it is impossible for the average person to understand how systems work (financial particularly), it is not surprising that many seek the metal comfort of absolutes and simple truths.
I don't think it is coincidental that gold attracts a fair share of such black and white thinking - gold itself is chemically inert and valued over centuries and cultures so has this timeless absolute nature about it.
Anyway, a long way to get to Ben Hunt's
latest article, which focuses on oil. A lot of what he writes on oil I found myself agreeing could be applied to gold:
- multiple explanatory factors
- the demand for "The Answer"
- the competition to provide "The Answer"
- the idea of "arriving at a useful assessment of what’s going on, not a Platonic effort at uncovering some eternal Truth with a capital-T"
- that "there is no Answer. In a structurally unstable market, there is no stable deterministic model of discrete market-exogenous factors like global supply/demand and monetary policy to 'explain'" gold prices.
Worth a read for those not scared of a bit of "I don't know".
