Gold Over $1300 First Time In Five Months

With gold prices now above $1,300 a month for the first time since August 2014 due to the global economic slowdown and plans for future quantitative easing.

Goldbugs are on edge anticipating the end of the bear market, and world events are all leading towards gold’s next leg up. The spot price reached $1,303 while February futures rose to $1,292. All this after a 4.6% increase in the gold price for the first time since 2013 last week.

“Geopolitical risk is as high as its been in many of our lifetimes”  said Marc O’Byrne, research director at Goldcore Ltd, told RT.  “The policy of response that we tend to see from the central banks, particularly the Western central banks and the Fed, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and now the ECB. Their policy tends to be to decrease interest rates, and they’re now nearly zero percent in the Western world,” he said “That’s the primary driver of high gold prices.”

“The more you create something, the less it will be worth in the long-term,” said O’Byrne. “So if you print trillions and trillions of dollars, pounds and euro, they will have less value over the long-term.”

“Gold is both a commodity and a currency, it’s very rare, and most people have no idea how rare it is,” he added. “That’s why it has retained its value throughout history.”

“The advice is you always put 5 to 10 percent of your wealth in gold. You hope the price for gold doesn’t go up very sharply because it generally means the rest of your wealth is not doing well. So that’s a very good hedge and diversification,” he said.

“If you see what happened to the Swiss franc vs. the dollar and the euro there last week, the Swiss franc rose by 40 percent against the dollar in about 13 minutes. So if it happened for the Swiss franc vs. the euro and the dollar, this can also happen for gold,” he said.

Jim Rickards echoed the sentiments:

#Gold just ticked over $1300. Maybe the central banks are supporting the price to encourage “inflationary expectations.”

— Jim Rickards (@JamesGRickards) January 21, 2015