Our society hasn’t lost its obsession with that shinny medal just yet. Despite Gold down –31% from its high, and down –18% for the year, Gold keeps popping up everywhere we look:

First, there was Apple announcing its next phone will be available in Gold (the color, not the metal, we think)

Photo Courtesy: USA Today

Then there was a great piece on Slate’s Blog MoneyBox delving into the economic and political undertones of the famous James Bond Classic: Goldfinger. Was this a classic Bond film with the ejector seat car, or a movie about the Bretton-Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates restricting British citizens from buying and storing large quantities of gold. The piece draws some eerie parallels with today, noting that Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson:

“As an alternative to devaluation, [Wilson] tried to rebalance the current account with a program of fiscal austerity. This merely put more pressure on the domestic economy and did not stop Britain from running a trade deficit that continued to leech the country’s gold reserves and eventually forced a devaluation in 1967.”

Photo Courtesy: James Bond Wikipedia 

We’ll prefer to remember Goldfinger for the Aston Martin DB5, henchman OddJob, and perhaps the most deliberate use of the double entendre in Bond Girl names; but it’s nice to know there was more to the back story for the movie than just a man who loved Gold.

Finally – there was the following tidbit on Zerohedge recently showing Gold moving into Backwardation where the near price is worth more than distance contracts. This is proof of a conspiracy in the physical Gold world for Zerohedge – where more than a few posts of theirs allege there isn’t enough physical Gold supply to meet all of the Gold investments based on such supply, but we’ll just chalk it up to an interesting move:

Source:  Zerohedge