More reasons to own gold coins

This story in the London Telegraph from the rarely disappointing Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, formerly of The Economist, makes you think that you just might not have enough of your personal wealth in gold coins.

Credit crunch will 'shred investment portfolios to ribbons'
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The near collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds has lifted the rock on our 21st century mutant capitalism, exposing the bugs beneath to a rare shock of naked light.

When creditors led by Merrill Lynch forced a fire-sale of assets, they inadvertently revealed that up to $2 trillion of debt linked to the crumbling US sub-prime and "Alt A" property market was falsely priced on books.

Even A-rated securities fetched just 85pc of face value. B-grades fell off a cliff. The banks halted the sale before "price discovery" set off a wider chain-reaction.

"It was a cover-up," says Charles Dumas, global strategist at Lombard Street Research. He believes the banks alone have $750bn in exposure. They may have to call in loans.
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Why has such excess happened? Because global liquidity flooded the bond markets in 2005, 2006, and early 2007, compressing yields to wafer-thin levels. It created an irresistible incentive to use debt.

What is the source of this liquidity? Take your pick. Goldman Sachs says oil exporters armed with $1,250bn in annual revenues have been the silent force, sinking wealth into bonds; China is recycling $1.3 trillion of reserves into global credit, a by-product of its policy to cap the yuan; Japan's near-zero rates have spawned a "carry trade", injecting $500bn of Japanese money into Anglo-Saxon bonds, and such; the Swiss franc carry trade has juiced Europe, financing property booms in the ex-Communist bloc. And, all the while, cheap Asian manufactures have doused inflation, masking the monetary bubble.

The deeper reason is the ultra-loose policy of the world's central banks over a decade. They "fixed" the price of money too low in the 1990s, prevented a liquidation purge to clear the dotcom excesses, then kept rates too low again from 2003 to 2006. Belated tightening has yet to catch up.

Don't blame capitalism. This is a 100pc-proof government-created monster. Bureaucrats (yes, Alan Greenspan) have distorted market signals, leading to the warped behaviour we see all around us.

As the BIS notes tartly in its warning on the nexus of excess, this blunder has official fingerprints all over it. "Behind each set of concerns lurks the common factor of highly accommodating financial conditions" it said.

Rebuking the Fed, it said Japan and Europe have turned sceptical of the orthodoxy that central banks can safely let asset booms run wild, merely stepping in afterwards to "clean-up".

The strategy leads to serial bubbles, creates an addiction to easy money, and transfers wealth from savers to debtors, "sowing the seeds for more serious problems further ahead".
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On it goes. Perhaps governments should simply stop trying to rig the price of money in the first place.

You never have to worry about one-ounce American Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, or South African Krugerrands being "marked to model".