I have a post up on the
corporate blog discussing a Harvard Business Review blog which attempts to get to the bottom of what constitutes a bubble.
If a bubble is when price exceeds an asset’s fundamental value, and according to people like Barry Ritholtz gold doesn’t have a fundamental value, then its price doesn’t have anything to exceed and hence it can never be in a bubble.
That is a bit of a flippant argument and and click baitish, but it was an intro in a quote by Eugene Fama from the HBR blog that I was more interested in:
“During the dot-com era … the high prices of startups like Amazon.com and Pets.com could be justified as rational gambles in the face of great uncertainty. It wasn’t crazy to think that a couple of these companies might end up as big and as profitable as Microsoft, and since it was hard to tell which ones it would be, high prices across the board made some sense.”
Isn't gold just a “rational gamble in the face of great uncertainty” about whether a country (or the world) can get itself out of its financial mess without unintended inflation or some other economic blow up?
Therefore arguing that gold is in a bubble is just arguing that people are paying too much for the insurance against uncertainty as they see it. That IMO is just a judgment call and who can claim they know their judgment is right and another’s is not?
