Bailout

Gold: The Glenn Beck indicator

By Felix Salmon

Ken Vogel’s very good article on the rip-off gold merchants sliming their way around the broadcast punditosphere never attempts to guesstimate the total amount of money that’s changing hands here. But it’s clear that the gold bubble is bringing out some most unsavory profiteers, who are signing up right-wing talk show hosts as spokesmen and selling not bullion but coins, which they can mark up to basically whatever they like.

What I’m wondering here is how much all this eschatologolical rhetoric is affecting the actual gold price. Certainly it attracts buyers:

Peter Epstein, president of Merit Financial Services, which advertises on Beck?s show, says gold retailers expect favorable coverage from commentators on whose shows they pay to advertise. ?You pay anybody on any network and they say what you pay them to say,? said Epstein. ?They?re bought and sold.?

Beck, who through a publicist declined to comment for this story, addressed the Media Matters allegation on his Thursday show, saying ?So, I shouldn?t make money?? And he made the point that he touted gold before he became a Goldline endorser, and urges viewers to study and pray before investing in it…

?I could care less what people think of him,? Merit?s Epstein said of Beck. ?We advertise on Fox because it makes the phone ring.?

If a large number of people are buying gold coins after listening to the likes of Glenn Beck, you can be sure that even more are buying GLD. And eventually demand for gold coins is itself likely to show up in a higher gold price. But this trend is going to have to run itself out sooner or later: you only load up on gold once, after which your only options are to hold or to sell.

I’m not calling a top to the gold market just because it’s fallen for two days in a row following Friday’s job report. But I’m getting that feeling you get when your cab driver starts talking about buying calls on dot-com stocks, or your house cleaner turns out to have bought three single-family homes in Florida. The likes of Ron Paul have been riding this train for a long time. But now that pretty much every single right-wing pundit has jumped on board, I can’t believe it has much further to go.

(HT: Drum)

Full post as published by Macroprudential on December 07, 2009 (boomark / email).