Aug. 12, 2011, 8:18 a.m. EDT
By Al Lewis
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — OK, so I was wrong about gold.
In my first column of the year, I boldly predicted gold (CNS:GC1Z) would top $1,700 an ounce in 2011. Now it’s passed $1,800.
“A rising gold price is God’s little messenger, reminding us the money we save for the future is just paper,” I wrote. Geez, I sounded like one of those crackpot spokesmen from the AM radio commercials: “Gold has never been worth zero!” And nobody seemed to take me seriously since I admitted that my forecast was based on questions posed to my Magic 8-Ball, rather than insights from a real market analyst or economist.
I’ve written columns bullish on gold since 2003, after gold hit an astonishing, nose-bleeding, long-time high of $385 an ounce.
Those were the good ol’ days when, if you said something nice about gold, readers would email to call you a “gold bug” or some kind of conspiracy theorist planning for the end of the United States of America, or something.
When gold rallied well over $500 an ounce in 2005, I interviewed some very smart people who were pretty sure gold was just another bubble.
“It’s had a nice run over the last 24 months,” Jeff Thredgold, an economist with Vectra Bank Colorado, told me in 2005. “But gold is easily the single-worst investment of the last 25 years.” LINK...
