News

May 11, 2009

At Long Last The Financial Times Adopts An Even Handed Approach To Gold As An Investment

By Charles Wyatt

What is this I see? The Financial Times has now adopted a sane approach to gold, admitting in its leader column on Saturday that “Fear has Made The Yellow Metal Desirable Once Again”. For so long now writers at the FT, particularly on the Lex Column, have been denigrating gold as an investment. In August 2004 they published a piece subheaded, “The Pointlessness of Holding Bullion Continues to Sink in” and followed this up three years later with a piece entitled ‘Stolid Gold.’ It does not need a brain surgeon to know what that was about and the timing was classic as the gold price then rose in what was very close to a straight line from US$680/oz to just on US$1,000 early in 2008.

At Minesite I then embarked on an e-mail conversation with the writer of the last article to try to persuade him that gold was a useful part of any sensible investor’s armoury. He was having none of that and I was dismissed as a gold nut, but since then he has been promoted to be Head of Lex in the US.  This promotion must reflect the anti-gold culture at the Pinker than Pink ‘Un, which took hold while Richard Lambert was editor and politico-economic arguments held sway above all else....