Gold isn’t buying as much oil as it used to

A talking head on television this weekend was discussing the worldwide price of rice, and noted that its relationship to gold had changed little. Over the past several months, she said, the amount of rice that an ounce of gold would buy had not changed significantly.

This, of course, led The Barrel to check what had happened to the relationship between gold and oil these last few months. The numbers are sobering.



We compared the price of the Handy & Harman daily gold fix to the Platts’ daily assessment of WTI. The question: how many barrels of WTI would an ounce of gold buy?

We started with last September, when the number was about 9 barrels per ounce. Beginning in January, the number soared, as the price of gold climbed and oil fell. By February 6, the number of barrels of oil that you could fetch with an ounce of gold had risen to 10.35.

The change since then has been remarkable, and it strongly undercuts the idea that the rise in the price of oil is simply a financial phenomenon. If gold is the ultimate storehouse of value and the currency of last resort, a commodity that is being driven primarily by currency factors should not be strengthening against that currency.

Platts