If historical norms are anything to go by, then something is definitely off-kilter with oil and gold markets. Historically, it has taken about 15 barrels of crude oil to buy an ounce of gold. Today that ratio is more like 22:1, due to oil prices touching five-year lows on Monday, while gold, in contrast, has stayed stubbornly high and, perversely, managed to fly in the face of just about everything else by staging an $18/oz rally on Monday.
There are many analysts that believe the greater risk to gold prices is to the downside than to the upside. Barclays’ Suki Cooper is one of them and reiterated the downside view on Monday in a research note. Cooper belongs to the camp of those believing a rise in US interest rates will happen sooner, rather than later, despite the Federal Reserve continuing to make no such indication in its policy statements to date. But a rise in interest rates is likely to serve only to strengthen the dollar further.
Conversely, the gold bugs would have us believe that, while the short-term prospects for gold prices point to weakness, the US’s inability to tackle its deficit and debt, and the implications for the broader economy, should support gold prices. The gold bugs keep talking about gold being the great store or preserver of wealth. But anyone that bought gold in the January 21, 1980 peak of $850/oz never made a profit, if allowing for inflation. They may have gotten close to achieving a profit if they had sold at the peak of August 2011, when gold prices rose briefly above $1,950/oz, but to really make a profit, allowing for inflation, they would have had to sell for about $2,200/oz.
Given the strength of the dollar, which has pushed most dollar-denominated commodities’ prices lower, including crude oil, gold ought to be under some downward pressure, but a looming Greek general election — the outcome of which is not entirely clear — has triggered a renaissance for the “Greece has no future in the eurozone” theory. Greece is roiling from a period of unprecedented austerity and one of the political forces in the country — the far-left Syriza Party — is campaigning on a promise of cancelling, renegotiating, or reneging on Greece’s sovereign debt, which could potentially give rise to a eurozone sovereign debt crisis that will make the previous one seem like a relative walk in the park.
Gold usually has an inverse relationship to the dollar, especially when it comes to the euro/dollar exchange rate. The previous eurozone sovereign debt crisis weakened the euro against the dollar. Yet, on several occasions, gold prices went up when the dollar rose against the euro, because gold was seen as a safe haven from the euro. The same thing pushed gold prices higher on Monday.
To prove history right on the oil/gold ratio, the logical conclusion might be that something has to give: either crude oil prices have to rise, or gold prices have to fall, or a bit of both, to restore the historical 15:1 ratio. So far, gold seems to be finding solid support at the $1,200/oz level, while crude oil, basis front-month NYMEX, dipped below $50/barrel on Monday, and only just about managed to settle above the $50 mark. All the talk seems to be of crude remaining under downward pressure.
Has the world changed in the last couple of months to the point that the old 15:1 ratio is no longer relevant? Perhaps only an historian will be able to answer that in a couple of decades’ time. But consider this: Russia is exporting more crude than at any time since before the collapse of the Soviet Union — desperate for petrodollars — even though in doing so, it is contributing to lower crude oil prices and adding to its enormous economic woes caused by sanctions from the EU and the US. Additionally, the US is becoming less reliant on crude oil imports, probably the main reason why OPEC chose not to cut production at its last meeting, in the hope of pushing oil prices lower in an attempt to render as many US shale plays as possible uneconomic, so that OPEC members can ultimately reap the long-term rewards.
It was not so long ago that President George W. Bush told us that the US was addicted to oil, leading to a widely held view that the US would forever be dependent on imports for most of its energy needs. From that perspective, the world does seem to have changed. The US may still be addicted to oil, but it is, at least, producing more of its own vice.
Periods of sustained low oil prices, result in widespread, sustainable economic growth; at least, they have in the past. So if we are in for a sustained period of low oil prices and history repeats itself, then maybe the widespread economic growth that the low oil prices generate will put the necessary pressures on gold and oil prices to restore the historical 15:1 ratio.