You may have seen this story in The Telegraph, the other day, about gold hitting a new all-time high in sterling terms, hopping around the £770 pounds per ounce mark, as concerns have grown about a hung parliament in Britain and the repercussions of the rumbling debt crisis in Greece.
If you believe that ‘gold is money’, then it’s more that sterling has hit an all-time low against gold, of course, with Sir Isaac Newton once setting the pound sterling to be just over £4 pounds an ounce. As previously examined on this site, we have therefore suffered a debasement since that time of approximately 180 times, or a diminution to just over 0.5% of the pound’s Newtonian value against a fixed weight of gold, most of that debasement taking place since 1914 and the start of the First World War, and especially since Britain left the gold standard in 1931.
Even if somehow the Greeks and the Germans can stitch together some kind of deal to hold the Euro together and even if there is a clear victor in today’s General Election, here in Britain, the pound sterling could still be in for a rough ride yet against the ‘safe haven’ of gold.