Swiss pegxit put a $70 rocket under gold prices but just wait for the ECB's QE this week to send prices to the moon
Peter Cooper

So the Swiss referendum on gold at the end of last year did prove to be a decisive point in the gold market cycle, after all. The fall to $1,138 on the ‘no’ vote marked the low of the cycle. However, for the rocket to send gold prices to the moon this was ‘the right country, just the wrong event,’ as Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley told ArabianMoney.

That event was the de-pegging or ‘pegxit’ of the Swiss franc from the euro last week. It send gold prices soaring $70 an ounce to above $1,280 an ounce. This is not the first time the Swiss National Bank has played an important role in the gold price.

Gold all-time high

It was on September 6th 2011 that the gold price hit its all-time high of $1,923 an ounce and on that date the SNB pegged the Swiss franc to the euro at 1.20. If the pegging was the event that sent gold prices into a long correction, then it will perhaps not be so surprising if this also works in reverse.

If so that may well not be as a direct but indirect consequence of the depegging. For we have to ask, why did the Swiss do it? Do they perhaps know something we don’t about the size of the European Central Bank’s QE money printing program coming up next week?

They may know that it is going to be so big that the Swiss peg would not have stood a chance of surviving, so it was a lot cheaper for them to kill it in advance. Money printing on a very large scale usually means only one thing for bullion prices and there is only so much manipulation that the central banks can hope to perform at the same time.

ECB QE tsunami?

Even the Fed ‘lost it’ as far as the gold price was concerned in the early years of its QE money printing. One thing is for certain; gold in euro terms will surge in value, and that should make it a much more attractive asset class to the 500 million people who live in the European Union. Don't be fooled this. It is not just about the eurozone; it is also about the countries around it for whom the bloc is an all-important trading partner.

So standby for another exciting week for gold coming up. The $70 price spike of last week may look nothing by comparison. Just as nobody correctly forecast the crash in oil prices last year probably nobody is going to get the rise of gold right this year. Volatile markets are very disturbing for crystal balls!

www.arabianmoney.net