As gold’s recent string of record high prices indicates, the interest in obtaining the precious metal has been considerable this year. Gainesville Coins, a Tampa based precious metals retailer, offers some industry insight into why that is.
Gold’s price had risen more than 34% since the start of 2024 as of Oct. 31; gold reached a new high that day of $2,790.10 per ounce, according to USA Today.
After the demand for gold from over-the-counter, investment and other sources hit a record 4,899 tons in 2023, the World Gold Council reported on Oct. 30 of this year that amid the recent rise in prices, the demand for gold in the third quarter of 2024 had increased 5% year-over year — surpassing $100 billion for the first time.
Multiple factors may be contributing to the current fervor for gold.
Private gold ownership, for instance, is a focus in numerous countries outside of the U.S., according to Everett Millman, a precious metals specialist at Gainesville Coins; residents in some nations purchase gold jewelry and other items with the intent to hold on to them for extended periods of time.
“It’s almost like a savings account, or something they can pass on to their children,” Millman says. “The German public holds about as much gold in aggregate as the German government does. In North America, investment portfolios have on average less than 1% exposure to gold — outside of North America, it’s very common for people to hold a lot of gold.”
The central bank-related demand for the precious metal has also been significant in recent years.
In 2022, banks’ gold buying rose 152% from the year before, reaching its highest level since 1950. Banks continued to obtain gold at a “breakneck pace” in 2023, according to the World Gold Council, making the second-highest amount of annual purchases in history.
Central banks have continued to express an interest in gold in 2024. World Gold Council Senior Markets Analyst Louise Street said in July that strong demand from central banks and the OTC market “has been a consistent trend throughout the year.”
Gainesville Coins on the Growing Use Case for Gold
The World Gold Council’s 2024 Central Banks Gold Reserves survey found the precious metal’s lack of default risk, performance during periods of crisis, historical position, liquidity, and ability to serve as a long-term store of value and inflationary hedge are the top reasons central banks have decided to hold gold.
“There’s a lot of talk right now internationally about countries trying to get away from the [U.S] dollar,” Millman says. “Other parts of the world, especially in the East, are forming economic blocks to together compete with the United States and the West. At the center of that are countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe who are accumulating gold reserves [to have] in the event government-issued currencies are very volatile or not trusted as much.”
Some are now utilizing gold as currency, Millman says. Gold can be a favorable commodity for several reasons — it’s been valued for thousands of years; it’s also extremely dense, making transporting large amounts of it cheaper than moving a commodity like uranium, for example.
“Countries outside of the United States use gold as a form of international settlement for trade,” he says. “It’s not just sitting there, even though that’s what gold usually does; this gold is actually changing hands.”
That’s been evident, Millman says, in the increase in gold flowing across borders since economic sanctions were placed on Russia after it invaded Ukraine.
“That’s an important development [because] it means regardless [of] what happens in the short term with the other [demand] factors, there’s a floor beneath the gold price,” the Gainesville Coins specialist says. “There’s this level that it’s not going to go below because it is so prevalently used in international trade.”
