Financial letter writer Mark Hulbert never offers a good word about gold, which is fine, but then never offers a relevant one either. This practice has turned him into a mere propagandist.
In his essay today at MarketWatch, headlined "Why Gold Won't Save Your Portfolio from Inflation's Bite" --
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-gold-wo...rtfolio-from...
-- Hulbert notes that gold often fails to correlate with inflation, though it is widely supposed to. Indeed, gold's underperformance of inflation in recent decades has been a major disparagement of the monetary metal.
But Hulbert fails to inquire into this anomaly, though possible explanations are obvious.
After all, even some mainstrem financial analysts now acknowledge that government's official inflation metrics are constantly revised and rigged to underreport inflation. Does anyone who buys his own groceries or pays medical insurance premiums or taxes still believe that, as officials long have been proclaiming, there is no inflation?
And what about surreptitious intervention by government in the gold market? Hulbert hasn't denied it but then he hasn't ever mentioned it. Documentation and admissions of it abound --
http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21
-- but Hulbert never gets past the supposed sentiment of retail investors as the primary determinant of the gold price.
"For gold to justify its current price in terms of inflation," Hulbert writes today, "the Consumer Price Index either needs to be 47 percent higher or gold needs to trade for $902."
But what if the CPI itself is completely invalid? And what if central banks have surreptitiously supplied or underwritten vast amounts of imaginary "paper gold" in the futures markets?
Those questions invite financial journalism. Hulbert's propaganda only deflects them.
