WHile gold is going north and trading at around 1740 USD/oz, near the recent highs, GS changed their mind.
Now they see XAU trading at aroun 2,000 USD/oz in the next 12 months.
Gold has struggled to find a direction since rebounding in late March on the back of the Fed’s ‘QE ‘ announcement as it remains torn between a large negative “Wealth” shock to EM consumers and CB demand and a surge in “Fear” driven DM investment demand. Indeed, the covid shock to EM consumer demand this year has been substantial. India’s gold imports plunged by 99% in April/May, while Russia’s central bank stopped buying gold since the oil price collapse. While the Chinese gold premium (a proxy for onshore demand) has recovered from recent lows, it still remains below its historical average.
Offsetting this weakness has been an unprecedented surge in DM “Fear” driven investment demand. Year-to-date gold coin demand is up 30%, total weight of gold in ETF’s is up 20% YoY and there is a large amount of latent gold demand. As a rule of thumb ETFs capture around half of physical investment volume inflows implying that DM investment demand could be up as much as 1000 tonnes which more than offsets the 700 tonne fall in EM consumer demand.
Such an unstable environment has raised concerns that, as risk-on sentiment improves with DM economies emerging from lockdown, the pace of DM investment demand will moderate due to less “Fear”, while EM “Wealth” demand will take longer to recover — creating room for a correction in gold prices. However, as we have argued in the past gold investment demand tends to grow into the early stage of the economic recovery, driven by continued debasement concerns and lower real rates. Simultaneously we see a material comeback from EM consumer demand boosted by easing of lockdowns and a weaker dollar. Accordingly, we are raising our 3/6/12 month gold price forecasts to $1800/1900/2000/toz from $1600/1650/1800/toz and maintaining our long Dec-20 gold trading recommendation
They are quite conservative on this exstimate, inmho.
They are also changing their view on the effectivenes of Gold hedging against inflation:
For gold prices to go materially above $2000, we believe inflation will need to move above the Fed’s 2% target and this move to be met with a muted policy response. Historically, gold’s relationship with inflation is non-linear. Gold does not display a strong correlation with inflation while the latter is moderate but becomes strongly correlated when inflation gets above a certain threshold. Gold also tends to go up moderately in deflationary environments. In fact, we find that what matters most is the deviation of inflation from its trend, rather than its absolute level (see Exhibit 11 and Exhibit 12). This is understandable — investor expectations of future inflation changes through time. For example, while a 5% inflation rate in the early 1980’s may have been perceived as relatively low, today it would represent a large upward surprise to the market. The relationship between gold and inflation gets stronger when we adjust inflation for its trend. The relationship holds in the post-Volcker period that excludes the extremely high inflation of the 1970’s.
So, they are now telling us gold is an effective hedge against inflation when inflation is higher than expected values.
Well, when do you want to be hedged? When inflation is expectedly low?
So, basically, this is a U-turn on their stamentent about gold since their last conference. Something makes me believe their true feelings about Digital Gold are not the ones they exposed in that conference.