People Line Up to Buy Gold in Britain

October 7th, 2008

WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.

I’m concerned to be reading “selling the house to buy” gold stories…

I hope people are taking a “Big Picture” view of the situation. And I say that as a BullionVault client and affiliate.

Many eggs. Many baskets.

Now, with caveats out of the way, if any more than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of people actually start moving their life’s savings into physical gold, as this story suggests is happening—and I have no idea if this is just dealers spraying bullshit around to drum up business—there is nowhere near enough physical gold to meet demand at these prices.

I hate writing these things. It puts me in the company of the snake handling gold bugs, from the newsletter industrial complex, who have been wrong for decades. But this isn’t about me, and it’s not about the snake handling gold bugs. This is about grannies and housewives and pissed off executives and scared shitless workers from many different walks of life saying, “F*@# this, I’m buying gold and I don’t care what happens to the price because it can’t go to zero like my confetti paper promises to pay. Take your banks, your stock market, your government bailouts and insert it! Give me gold.”

People buying the gold ETFs is one thing, but lining up to buy tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds worth of physical gold at a time…

We are definitely moving into a different phase.

Via: Telegraph:

Savers have been queuing in the street to buy gold bars and coins, as they search for a safe place to invest their money.

London’s two leading bullion dealers, ATS Bullion and Baird & Co, have reported a rush of interest from savers, many of whom have hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of savings they want to convert into the precious metal.

At least two customers have invested the entire proceeds from selling their houses into gold, each buying up more than £500,000-worth of gold bars, according to one dealer.

Savers have been queuing in the street at ATS Bullion, whose offices are just off the Strand in London’s west end.

Sandra Conway, the company’s managing director, said: “We’ve had to turn people away. The queues have been right out of the door and it’s been really hectic at times.

“Ever since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the phones have been going off the hook.”

Traditionally, gold has been one of the safest investments during times of financial turmoil. In 1973 gold cost just $60 an ounce and hit $650 in 1981.

However, since the summer the price of gold has fallen as the dollar has strengthened – the two are linked quite closely.

But the fact that gold has not performed well in recent months has not deterred thousands of investors.

“They don’t think of gold as a way of making money. They think of it as a safeguard in these turbulent times. You can move gold quickly, in a way that you can not with shares or cash in a bank account,” Ms Conway said.

The average investor is buying up between £10,000 and £50,000 in bars on each visit, but it is possible to buy as little as a half sovereign coin, which costs about £70.

Some analysts say that while it may be romantic to buy bars of gold, there is a far more practical way to investing in gold. Investors can buy Exchange Traded Funds, which are like shares – they trade on the stock market – and they are directly linked to the price of gold.

Mick Gilligan, at stockbrokers Killik & Co, said that his clients had been asking about investing in gold in far greater numbers in recent weeks.

“It’s lot easier to sell than the gold you keep in your sock drawer,” he said.

Posted in Economy | Top Of Page

5 Responses to “People Line Up to Buy Gold in Britain”

  1. Eileen says:

    Ya Kevin, a different phase entirely, that I’m not sure I’m equipped to comment on coherently. ( I just watched the debate between Obama and McCain).
    I read today from an obscure white paper presented to Congress a week or so ago on the bailout that the bank where Mom and I do our financial transactions is an at risk bank with a D+ rating. How stellar is that?
    I also dunno about the rest of you reading this post but I freaked out about the financial situation in the world about a year ago.
    My dictum in all my actions was to do what Mom wanted. Preserve the wealth of Mom and Dad’s, and well add to it Grandma and Grandpa’s wealth. I don’t know if have accomplished Mom’s dictum. Or if I can.
    But I will tell you this. I have been about a year ahead of all that is going down now. Much thanks to Kevin. Ohmygod. A compass extraordinaire.
    He won’t brag about his prescience, but there it is.
    Many eggs. Many baskets.
    That the peoples in the UK are rushing to gold lifts my boat( an air blown inflated plastic swimming pool raft) a little higher.
    The message I hear in this action is we want security.
    @Miraculix
    Awesome post on the crash of the 1929-30’s.
    All of my lifetime with my mother, before the stroke that took her voice away, my mother would never shut up about the Depression. Tonight I feel really bad about all the times in my life I just wanted her to shut the eff up. Mom’s hanging in there. I tell her what’s going in the world and she is unable to tell me what to do. She looks at me when I tell her what’s going on, and raises her eyebrow in question.
    What are YOU going to do?
    Well friends its like a circular discussion. Mom didn’t like that her parents made gin in some fashion and made a profit. Mom’s parents must have had a pact between them, if we get caught, Grandpa does the time in jail. And he did so. ALL of my grandparents bought property at fire sale prices for rentals. They all gambled on buying and selling depressed real estate.
    I dunno why I am rambling on like this. But I don’t think our future prosperity is going to come from a bailout plan or Obama as President.
    I’m going to vote for Obama just because I want to. I also think that the Illumanati have seen the writing on the wall and are going to work overtime to crush Obama. Not because he is an nword but because they need to crush him for all that he represents so badly.
    Yah, well good luck Illumanati.You and your dark “knights” are no longer welcome on this planet. You can gaze at, but not KISs my ass.
    Morons.

  2. John Doh says:

    Blame computers and Binyamin Shalom Bernanke’s
    (& his overseers)plan to drive everyone to the investment casinos.
    Where,a lifetime of careful planning and savings could be taken away
    on a 2% loss,..JUST LIKE THAT “snaps fingers”.
    When,the filthy connected masses see
    it drawn on a pretty pie chart in (semi)real time and panic.
    How,there is no more order to stock markets,people don’t hold long term and will abandon the stock du jour in a heartbeat looking for the next candidate for cannibalization.
    Go ahead cut interest rates again,…there will be one final run on Banks at that point.
    People have no choice for their savings to get any rate of return even close to inflation.
    Stock Market baby.
    BUY/SELL
    And that they do,…look where that is now.
    No other choice except metals and commodities.
    I got a funny ass feeling in mid 90s when every segement of the employed great unwashed got in on the 401k boom( I bet Booger King and even McDohnalds offer 401’s now albeit without in kind vested matching contributions).
    It took me 3 years to make up my mind and stop adding contributions.
    Then another one to get a distribution to get away from the newly minted financial herd on the way to slaughter at the hands of their unknown wealth management financial services gurus(who constantly take their cut).
    I made out like a fat rat right before dot.com bust,…right before it all went POOF.
    The slogan for the 00’s should be “NOW WITH BIGGER BUST”
    supah syze me

  3. Loveandlight says:

    Wisconsin lets you vote at your local city hall visa-vis absentee ballots as much as a month before the actual election. Today I voted for Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. Not because I think it really means anything, but because I felt I had to do it in order to rip out the pipes in the deepest reaches of my mind that keep pumping the Democratic Party Kool-Aid into my consciousness.

    The final straw was Obama’s voting for the spy-bill which brings the encroaching police-state enormously closer in addition to the retroactive immunity for the telecoms. Had it not been for that, there is just so much for which I would have been willing to forgive him that my mind would probably be as awash as ever with Democratic Party Kool-Aid despite reading Cryptogon.com every day. Hey, so in a weird sort of way, Obama probably did at least some of us a favor by voting for that spy-bill and lobbying like hey-go-mad for the phony bail-out! 😀

  4. tochigi says:

    Tokyo down 8% today. ouch.
    TOPIX breaches 900 or the first time in about 5 years. ouch.
    down roughly 23% in 9 trading days.
    this is starting to look ominous.
    down about 50% in 15 months. mmmmmmm.
    have to plant that vege garden in the weekend, i reckon. i wonder how chooks would go in this micro-garden in tokyo’s inner suburbs…
    at least i bought a new bike…

  5. Loveandlight says:

    Apologies for beating a dead horse, but last night after writing my above comment, I thought of an image that sums it up pretty well: US politics are like a prison cafeteria, and liberals and progressives in this country have become the inmates who just stare with sullen passivity regardless of whatever foul slop the Democratic Party trustees are plopping into our dented metal bowls. I may have a laundry-hamper full of personal issues, but I still have just enough self-respect that I don’t want to be that way anymore!

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