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Anything but gold - The golden constant revisited

Jean-François Carpantier

Journal of Commodity Markets, 2021, vol. 24, issue C

Abstract: This paper revisits the golden constant – gold’s property of keeping constant purchasing power – via a comparison with a set of 17 commodities (energy, metals and agricultural products). We use graphical devices of the CPI-deflated commodity prices first, then stationarity tests designed to assess how fast the real prices of the commodities revert to their “constant” and, finally, measurements of their convergence speed. We find that the real price of gold is far from constant, farther than the real price of most other commodities. We also note that the mean reversion of gold’s real price to its constant/average is weaker and slower than that for most other commodities. These findings suggest that most commodities perform better than gold when it comes to keeping constant purchasing power. A portfolio of commodities would provide liquidity similar to that of gold while offering investors more stable protection against inflation.

Keywords: Gold; Inflation; Safe haven; Portfolio diversification; Hedging; Commodities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 G10 G11 G15 N20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jocoma:v:24:y:2021:i:c:s2405851321000040

DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomm.2021.100170

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Journal of Commodity Markets is currently edited by Marcel Prokopczuk, Betty Simkins and Sjur Westgaard

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