Reuters published an article lately about oil prices in six different emerging market currencies. The graph embedded in this article shows how oil prices are setting new all-time highs in Brazilian reals, Russian rubles, South-African rands and India rupees. Because of the decline of emerging market currencies, people in those countries pay record high prices for a barrel of oil. But what about the goldprice?
Goldprice in foreign currencies
The graphs by Reuters inspired us to do the same with gold, which set a new all-time high in dollars in 2011. The goldprice peaked at about $1.920 per troy ounce and has declined ever since. Right now, the price of gold in dollars is about 34% below the all-time high. But what about the price of gold in beaten down emerging market currencies? Marketupdate collected some data and made the following graphs. Most of the data is from the weekly updated spreadsheet published by the World Gold Council, while some data is based on historic exchange rates on the forex market.
The graphs start at the 9th of September 2011 and ends with the gold price at the end of January 2014.
Goldprice in six emerging market currencies since Sept 2011
As you can see the price of gold in some emerging market currencies didn’t drop nearly as much as the goldprice in dollars or euros. In South-African rand, the goldprice was actually higher last week than it was in September 2011 (when the goldprice in dollars peaked at $1920 per troy ounce). When measured in Brazilian real, the gold price at the end of January 2014 was only 4,15% below the level of September 2011. For the Turkish lira and the Indian rupee, the gold price went down only 10,3 and 15,5% respectively, much less than the 34% price decline in US dollars over the same period.
Gold as a hedge
Gold is above all a hedge against a decline in the local currency. No matter how much governments and the central banks abuse their fiat currencies, they can not influence gold. That’s why they don’t like you to buy gold. The precious metal is a hedge against their fiat currency system, which is only good as medium of exchange and unit of account. The store of value lies in physical things, gold being the most liquid and uniform one of them.
