The FED cannot win the inflation fight (confirmed by their recent soft pivot back to QE) and gold will not go up until the traders realize this fact.
Literally every economic misprediction can be blamed on not accounting for the way people actually behave in real-world economies, but…that’s not something that adds credibility for the next prediction by the same predictor.
We have gotten 1 and 2 but we haven't gotten to 3 because traders believe that the FED can win the inflation fight. The FED abandoned the inflation fight with a soft pivot yet traders are still not buying gold. This is what Peter couldn't foresee...traders' unwillingness to go against the FED.
This is not a misprediction because in any sane world, the prospects of very high inflation would result in a spike of the gold price.
Describing any part of the financial system as sane (rational) is laughable. The system is built on the irrational nature of people.
In some absurd way, bank runs are an expression of actual rationality - give me my cold hard cash now, I don't trust you lot anymore.
Keynes mentioned "animal spirits" and "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" almost a hundred years ago. If your prediction doesn't account for reality and well know facts it's a bad prediction.
It would be like guessing that the next election will favor candidate X and when they don't win explaining it away with "well but people are dumb".
Since it was a prediction of the behavior in the real world, and it doesn’t reflect what actually occurred, it is a misprediction.
The fact that the predictor (or you) believes that a world in which the prediction was accurate would be more sane doesn’t make the wrong prediction better, since it wasn’t offered as a prediction of what would occur in some hypothetical sane world.
Gold is not a store (or measure) of value. Nobody cares about gold. Sure, some people might like to have a gold ring or necklace, but that’s a tiny amount of material for a small number of people and it’s demand (like diamonds) is primarily marketing driven, and easily satisfied by a side effect of copper mining. Until the average Joe demands that his life savings be spent on a gold sarcophagus, it just won’t matter.
People tend to prefer fancy cars and houses and electronics and vacations and food and drink.
And you can see the cost of all those things has more than doubled in recent years, a clear indicator of inflation cause by (practically) zero percent interest rates.
Simple heuristic: if it’s easily digestible, it probably doesn’t serve true understanding. I think that especially true for newspaper articles related to economics.
If he is as smart or knowledgeable as he claims or held up to be, then he should have factored that into his forecast and advice. IF the fed is going to do everything in its power to save the economy, why fight it?
This is a popular sentiment among traders...why fight the FED? Because there is nothing they can do to bring inflation back to 2%. They all but admitted this with their return to QE. When the masses realize this...gold will surge.
Alas if, for some inexplicable reason, those unwashed masses don't realize that the gold I bought cheap, isn't the only thing worth buying (at my inflated price) then I will be most disappointed.
I guess it doesn't help that gold-hawking is looking more and more scammy everyday, like when c-level political celebrities with large followings seem happy to flog their "sponsors gold" during political messaging.