Inflation is an inevitable part of the current economic and financial system. While the rates of inflation might be different among countries, depending on the management of the economy, one thing common about inflation in various countries is its persistency. The persistency of inflation can only be due to the continuous increase in the money supply at a rate higher than the production of goods and services, which is a common feature of the fiat monetary system that the world economies have adopted today. Faced with continuous inflation, individuals and businesses are forced to hedge against inflation by investing in various assets, rather than keeping their wealth in the form of cash. The current study adopts OLS analysis and cointegration techniques to test gold, real estate and stocks as a hedge against inflation, using quarterly data of six countries for the period from 1991 to 2008. The assets are selected as proxies of both real and financial assets while countries are selected with the objective of presenting countries with different rates of financial and economic development in order to analyze and compare the performance of each asset as a hedge against inflation. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that gold is a good hedge against inflation in most of the cases as compared to real estate and stocks. It performs well as an inflation hedge in both developed and developing economies, but in long run only. Real estate, on the other hand, presents a good inflation hedge in developing countries and mostly in the long run, while stocks as a hedge against inflation performed well in developed countries and mostly in the short run only.

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1.7, University of Leicester (Center of Management), language: English, abstract: To date, nobody has formulated a comprehensive theorem to determine gold valuation or precious metal prices. Until fairly recently, Eugene Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis was the predominant paradigm explaining asset markets but today it is widely acknowledged that markets can be irrational and investors are prone to act irrationally. When trying to explain gold market anomalies, behavioural science approaches can be useful. Phenomena such as herding (‘group think’), ‘safe value bias’ and investors’ ‘excessive extrapolation’ can help explain positive price performance over a certain time. In this dissertation, the author investigates the applicability of a multivariate ARIMA (auto-regressive, integrated, moving average) model to help explain gold price movements from 1973 to 2011. This model uses the gold price and independent variables such as inflation, real interest rates, silver prices, the US dollar money supply (M2), oil prices, the MSCI World index and the S&P 500 as these are linked to gold and/or highly correlated with the gold price. The evaluation criteria were defined as R-squared, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and BIC. The model was calculated over so-called ‘normal times’ and times of crises (one political, one financial). The researcher used SPSS’ Expert Modeler to find the best-fitting ARIMA model and to identify the independent variables significantly contributing to the fit of the model. Remarkably, a multivariate ARIMA model using independent variables explained almost twice as much of the variability of the gold price as a univariate ARIMA model using only the gold price. Also, throughout the complete period and during normal times the model explained a much higher percentage of the variability of the gold price than during crises and comparably more of the independent variables contributed significantly to the fit of the model (5 vs. 2). This can be explained by investors’ tendencies to buy gold to preserve their assets (“safe value”), to follow the crowd (“herding”) and to extrapolate past price chart developments. The results show that in an attempt to discern the cause of gold price movements, a multivariate ARIMA model outperforms a univariate ARIMA model significantly. The results of the study furthermore indicate researchers evaluating different methods to fit a time series should consider a multivariate ARIMA model, especially if the independent variables are highly correlated with the dependent variable.

The dollar is in trouble. It has fallen against other currencies for the past three years, and now its orderly retreat could well become a rout. This spells potential disaster for the American economy—and potential riches for a few smart investors. In The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It, financial gurus James Turk and John Rubino show how the dollar arrived at this precipice, why it will plunge, and how you can profit from the resulting financial crisis. The U.S. today is the world’s biggest debtor nation, printing money with abandon to sustain the illusion of prosperity. The federal government owes $7 trillion and its debt is soaring. As a society, we owe more than $37 trillion, or about $500,000 per family of four. Our trade deficit with other countries is staggering, and to finance this mountain of debt we’re flooding the world with dollars. The inevitable result: The dollar will decline until it is displaced as the world’s dominant currency. Precious metals will soar in value, and gold will reclaim its monetary role at the center of the global financial system. Traditionally a haven during times of uncertainty, gold has risen dramatically since 2001. By the fall of 2004 it was up by nearly 50%, at over $400 an ounce. But this is just the beginning. James Turk, a leading gold authority and the founder of GoldMoney.com, and veteran financial writer John Rubino, show readers how to capitalize on gold’s dramatic climb. In The Coming Collapse of the Dollar, Turk and Rubino reveal which stocks and bonds will falter as the dollar declines and why that decline is virtually inevitable. They offer strategies for using gold coins, gold stocks, gold-based digital currencies, and other hard assets to create a profitable portfolio. And they explain how to make the most of your gold and other precious metal holdings, identifying the opportunities and pitfalls of buying gold mining stocks and the mutual funds that invest in them. America’s debt binge has put its economy at grave risk. The value of the dollar is falling; many stocks are once again wildly overvalued; and bonds, tied to an ever-diminishing dollar, are a disaster waiting to happen. By investing in gold and other hard assets, Turk and Rubino explain how you can protect yourself from these dangers. The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It is a must read for every investor, whatever the size of his or her portfolio. For more information, visit www.dollarcollapse.com.

An unabated investors' interest in gold is reflected by increasing investment demand and the development of new instruments like exchanged traded funds tracking the performance of the yellow metal. Despite its risk-return inefficiency compared to the S&P 500 equity market index, gold is historically perceived by investors as alternative to fiat currencies and a protection against extreme market events which justifies its unique risk properties: exchange-rate and inflation hedge as well as diversification and safe-haven properties. Similar to previous findings, this thesis empirically confirms that gold displays dollar - hedge property and protects against inflation in the long-run. Based on the implementation of the asymmetric model and high and low volatility regimes the safe-haven characteristics of gold are analyzed. A procedure that estimates time-varying coefficients allows to investigate the dynamics of specific properties. In particular, the results show that gold failed to act as a safe-haven during the recent financial crisis. Due to the high correlation with gold returns, ETF display similar dollar-hedge and safe-haven properties, but the period of the available data is too short to provide any meaningful results concerning inflation protection. With the exception of dollar - hedge property, mutual funds and gold mining companies present non-identical risks for an investor when compared to gold.

Long-term investors face a common problem-how to maintain the purchasing power of their assets over time and achieve a level of real returns consistent with their investment objectives. While inflation-linked bonds and derivatives have been developed to hedge the effects of inflation, their limited supply and liquidity lead many investors to continue to rely on the indirect hedging properties of traditional asset classes. In this paper, we assess these properties over different time horizons, in the context of a diversified portfolio. Using a vector error correction model, we find that effective short-run hedges, such as commodities, may not work over longer horizons and that tactical asset allocation could enhance investment returns following inflation surprises.

In this updated, second edition of the highly acclaimed international best seller, The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures, Richard Duncan describes the flaws in the international monetary system that have destabilized the global economy and that may soon culminate in a deflation-induced worldwide economic slump. The Dollar Crisis is divided into five parts: Part One describes how the US trade deficits, which now exceed US$1 million a minute, have destabilized the global economy by creating a worldwide credit bubble. Part Two explains why these giant deficits cannot persist and why a US recession and a collapse in the value of the Dollar are unavoidable. Part Three analyzes the extraordinarily harmful impact that the US recession and the collapse of the Dollar will have on the rest of the world. Part Four offers original recommendations that, if implemented, would help mitigate the damage of the coming worldwide downturn and put in place the foundations for balanced and sustainable economic growth in the decades ahead. Part Five, which has been newly added to the second edition, describes the extraordinary evolution of this crisis since the first edition was completed in September 2002. It also considers how the Dollar Crisis is likely to unfold over the years immediately ahead, the likely policy response to the crisis, and why that response cannot succeed. The Dollar Standard is inherently flawed and increasingly unstable. Its collapse will be the most important economic event of the 21st Century.