CNBC Laughs At Bullish Gold Prediction. A Sign Of An Impending Rise?

[The following post by TDV Senior Analyst, Ed Bugos]

Robert McEwen was on CNBC’s “Fast Money” Wednesday afternoon to talk about the gold miners, which are up 30% compared to gold’s 7% gain so far this year, as well as McEwen Mining (MUX:TSX), which I recently added to the TDV portfolio. You can watch the clip here.

CNBC has been a gold hater for as long as I have been writing up the gold story back to 2000.  They laughed and ridiculed and shamed the story all the way up!

Hence, I know where they are coming from –they don’t see the outperformance of the miners as a leading indicator of anything, but only as a little flurry of speculation that is too far from the mean and thus will ultimately be wrong.

As McEwen talked about MUX, gold, and what has happened in the sector – which nobody on CNBC cares about – one of the traders on the show interrupted him to ask whether or not the miners were going to start hedging gold now, which he had also pointed out the miners failed to do when they should have at the $1900 top.

McEwen responded with his bullish target: $5000, and he threw out a time line too: 3-4 years.  It was at this point that the camera went back to Amanda Drury (at the 2 minute mark in the clip at the link above) who reacted with outright laughter, which the network edited out leaving only a mocking look.

Now, McEwen has been a guest on the show since the beginning of this gold bull market (early 2000’s) as well, and I have no doubt in my mind that they knew ahead of time that they had invited a very bullish miner to talk.  Not just that, Goldcorp, which he co-founded, made a splash in the early years by marketing itself as being about as anti-hedging as was possible…all the way up from $300 his slogan was “gold is money” and they had a program of withholding gold production from the market to do just the opposite of what the hedgers were doing: that is, Goldcorp was accumulating a net long. So the surprised look and classless live laughter in reaction to his call for gold $5000 in “3 or 4 years” seems to me a bit cheap, even for them.

Gold went from $35 to $200 in 3-4 years, $100 to $850 in 3-4 years, and from $300 to $1900 in 11 years.  These are gains of approximately, 500%, 750%, and 550% – all of which occurred despite various naysayers.  Anyone with any experience in the market has seen things far more extreme than gold tripling or quadrupling from these levels over 3-4 years.  Did Amanda Drury expect the Dow to crash in 2008 like it did?  Did she expect it to recover and go off to record highs five years later like it did?  Did she (as her cohort pointed out) expect Apple to go from $3 to nearly $300 per share in 3-4 years, or from $100 to $1000 in the same time?

How many people expected Citigroup to collapse?  It was my favorite short in the whole market back in 2000 when I was short the stock market, which I have not been so far in this cycle.  I have seen things in my 25 years in the business that would not make me laugh at such a call even if I were bearish on gold.

CNBC’s reaction was contrived, especially as gold is on the verge of breaking out and CNBC has always knocked it at such times.  For a gold call that isn’t all that far from the mean – especially given that the yellow metal has outperformed most investment asset classes for over a decade – Drury’s reaction would seem to portray her naivety.  

When I first predicted in 2000 that gold would go to $2000 by 2013 people thought that call was out of touch with reality.  They thought you would have had to have hyperinflation to get numbers like that from $300 per ounce.

We had a lot more inflation than I expected, except it is still mostly in assets –not to minimize the consumer price inflation that we have indeed experienced too. Below you can see how many billions of dollars are in circulation per troy ounce of gold today, and in the past.

These people act as if they have no idea that the only reason the Dow and the S&P 500 have nearly tripled off their 2008 bottoms (a period of about 5 years) is thanks to the nearly doubling of money supply since that time.  Indeed, they probably don’t.

Our forecast for gold today is for it to get to $3-5k by 2017.  I have raised this target from my original call of $2700  owing to the unexpected actions of the Fed.  My original target assumed that the unsound monetary policy would have been abandoned by then.  Instead it was expanded and compounded and amplified.

The new forecast presages a severe stagflation over the next few years. That look you see on Drury’s face at the end of that clip is the one you see as you are about to hit a deer on the highway, and it’s too late. The laughter is a bullish sign; it is a sign of hubris. My critics laughed at my call for $2000, and they are doing the same again today with a more modest target as though they have not learned anything. The only time they stopped laughing in the past 14 years was for precisely that brief moment where they should have been selling gold and buying the Dow.

Those who look to people like Amanda Drury on CNBC for their investment advice will find out the hard way that she has no clue of what she is talking about. 

Jeff Berwick, I believe, has it totally correct with his “5 Killer Bees” to survive The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It (TEOTMSAWKI): bullion (and the miners), bitcoin, bullets, bud (medical marijuana which TDV Golden Trader currently covers and finds amazing investment opportunities in the space) and “being”.

Next week I’ll be bringing another investment opportunity to TDV Premium subscribers in the junior gold mining space.  If gold even half does what I think it will over the next few years many of these $0.05 junior gold/silver mining stocks will have exponential returns.  The fact that they are laughing about the gold price rising dramatically on CNBC is just another indicator that the gold market now is near the same level psychologically as it was in 2000 when it was at $250.

Questions or comments? Feel free to join the discussion at The Dollar Vigilante.