Some €700m per day is being pulled from Greek banks. Global stock markets have fallen over 7% already this month, the broad commodity markets have fallen for 10 out of 11 days, and crude oil is trading at a 6-month low, down 15% from February.
Yet the distinct attributes of gold – un-inflatable, economically useless (relatively speaking) incorruptible gold, with its zero credit risk and 5,000 years of monetary use – count for nothing. In Dollar and Sterling terms, it's now back where it started last summer's big move.
It's like summer 2011 never happened...
That's precisely what happened in late 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Bros. – and the missed opportunity to let every other over-leveraged investment fraud go bust as well – drove equities, commodities and gold sharply lower.
By mid-October 2008, gold had re-traced the entire surge that started with Bear Stearns' hedge-fund failures of mid-2007, running to the peak above $1000 per ounce when Bear Stearns itself failed into the loving embrace of J.P.Morgan the following March.
Here again in 2011-2012, the crisis proved good for gold at first, but the whole move has been unwound as global credit deflation sucked the air out of gold futures and options, and wipe-out losses in other assets forced even true believers to quit their positions.
Gold prices have the potential to recover, reckons a UBS analyst on Bloomberg TV. No doubt he's right. But how strong is gold's immediate potential given the overwhelming bullishness of every other tomfool able to voice his opinion in public.
"Last time we talked, last September or October, you asked what I thought, and I was bullish at $1800," said one MBA with the certainty of a 12-year old to Business Insider a week ago.