Ben Bernanke failing to blaze like a news comet in front of the House budget committee just now: US recovery steady but unspectacular; limited impact from Europe crisis so far; need to do something about the deficit in the medium term. The usual. One query came up from Paul Ryan (R-WI), the committee’s hawk-in-residence: why is gold hitting an all-time high? Is it a general flight from fiat currencies because investors think central banks are going to inflate the debt away?

Bernanke, predictably, thought (i.e. promised) not, offering the observation that gold was out there on its own “doing something different from the rest of the commodity group” and confessing that he didn’t fully understand movements in gold prices. Looking at long-term yields almost across the board, except for the default risk countries like Greece, it’s hard to argue he’s wrong. There are some anomalies that encourage investors to hold government debt, like the UK pension regulations which created artificial demand for gilts for a long time (one of the reasons the Debt Management Office was able to flog so many long-dated bonds), but not to this level. Gold still looks like the outlier, not the bellwether. Read more