Sunshine Profits

Analysts for Goldman Sachs have recently predicted that low interest rates will keep gold prices climbing for the rest of this year and into 2012 and raised their price forecasts for the precious metal to $1,930 per ounce from $1,860. So far this year, the price of gold is up about 26 percent.

This week’s events are like theater, with shades of a Greek tragedy. In a play the audience knows that if there is a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third. Now we’re in the second act and so far, the plot is predictable. The script was written back in 2008 when the subprime crisis hit.

Is Greece the canary in the coal mine? Less than a week after European leaders crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s on the debt-restructuring plan for Greece, the prime minister’s ruling party called for a surprise referendum on the E.U. debt deal.

The yellow metal, money for more than three millennia, has a close relationship to other forms of money. Some argue that it isn’t gold that has risen in value in the last decade, as much that fiat currencies have lost value against gold.

A recent International Monetary Fund report estimates that China exports more inflation to the developing countries than had been previously assumed. For every 1 percentage increase in Chinese inflation, the increase in Asia-Pacific countries is 0.25-0.5 percent.

Whenever gold prices rise or decline the headlines give a flavor-of-the-week reason—the dollar is up, the dollar is down, the eurozone is in trouble, it’s the latest jobs report, etc.

At the beginning of the year Brazil warned that the world is on course for a full-blown “trade war” as it stepped up its rhetoric against exchange rate manipulation.

No good news to deliver so far this year on the eurozone. Just this week Slovakia’s government became the first in the eurozone to fall over opposition of bailing out indebted economies after the country’s parliament voted down approval for enhancing the zone’s rescue fund.

The news over the last few weeks, including worries about a possible major banking crisis could cripple the Eurozone economy as a whole, has sent global financial markets down heavily.

There are times when we need to have the courage of our convictions, even when we are losing money in the process. (That’s where the courage part comes in. Like Ernest Hemingway said: “Courage is grace under pressure.”) We are still bullish on the precious metals sector in both short- and long term. Although the whole sector moved lower again early this week, important support levels remained firm. Many of our readers are probably concerned, as it is easy to get emotional at times of uncertainty.