Gold Prices Sag

(But at $1,678/oz today, the price is beginning to creep up again!)




Price of gold is dropping:

New York (April 4) • The price of gold, which has climbed for years like a blood pressure reading for anxious investors, plunged Wednesday to its lowest level in three months.

Gold fell almost $58, to $1,614 per ounce. It has declined 15 percent since September, when it hit a peak of $1,907. It had more than doubled since the financial crisis three years earlier.

..."It’s difficult to forecast, but I think the gold bull market is over," said Cetin Ciner, a professor of finance at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. He likened the surge in gold to dot-com stocks before they collapsed.

..."Fear has been gold’s best friend, and so to the extent that fear is dissipating, gold should fall," said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management. "We might look back at these Fed minutes as the line in the sand."

...The Fed’s efforts to pump money into the banking system and avert a deep recession led to fears of runaway inflation, a concern shared by both the tea party and big-shot investors.

Buying gold soon became a political statement. For those who didn’t trust financial institutions or were wary of the government, it was the investment of choice. The television personality Glenn Beck advised viewers to stock up on gold bars.

"Gold became a symbol of your political leanings," Bailin said. "It became a way to speculate on the solvency of the economy."

Or perhaps to speculate that the price would continue to rise, whatever the reason. Some analysts, like Ciner and Wells Fargo’s Paulsen, said that as the price climbed ever higher, everyday investors may have been trying to catch the wave.

Gold was named the "best investment" in CNBC’s quarterly survey of investors released last month, topping real estate and stocks by a wide margin. Nearly half of those surveyed considered it a bad time to buy stocks.