Bill Gross of PIMCO Joins the Sell Gold Camp (Updated for Clarity)

Commodities & Metals

Published: April 17, 2013 12:15 pm

Last Updated: March 26, 2020 5:32 pm

OK, so everyone knows that the price of gold is tanking. After peaking at almost $1,800 and falling under $1,400, now the calls are growing louder and louder to sell gold. Bill Gross of PIMCO, who is also called the Bond King, has now joined in from the PIMCO Twitter feed saying that Monday was no one-off and Wednesday is not a two-off. His message sounds as though it is against gold, but the real intent appears to be that Mr. Gross thinks that gold has started a levered market sell-off.

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UPDATE at 1:00 PM EST: Mark Porterfield of PIMCO has reached out to say that Bill Gross has the official position of buying gold as the world is reflating (April 15 tweet) as he made a bad call in the Barron’s Roundtable. His tweet today is said to be aimed at levered market assets but not aimed at gold. We will leave the interpretation of the tweets to you as you will see below.

My emailed response to PIMCO was as follows: “I am going to run this as an update but this is Gross’ fault for choosing his wording this way. I am copy/pasting this because it is more than a bit misleading. If he doesn’t want to confuse people like in the death of the cult of equity comments then he really needs to choose his wording better. His wording throws people off balance and is very misleading.”

Here are the Twitter images below:

One thing additional to point out is that Dow Jones newswires had the same interpretation as its FX Chat also interpreted this as a “Bill Gross Sell Gold” call.

We are not running this as a correction but as an update. I don’t want to tell people how to write when they are well respected and tenured as Mr. Gross is, but his wording is more than a bit misleading in this instance.

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We would warn that this may grow, or it may be in a trade, as this is again from the PIMCO Twitter feed. Gross was also shown to have said “buy Treasuries” in his feed. One thing we caution against is that it was shown last week that PIMCO and Bill Gross had again become positive on longer-dated Treasury notes and bonds.

Another warning we would make is that in recent months Mr. Gross had warned over and over that investors should own things that will rise in value against all of the printed money entering the global economy.

This sounds a bit like the death of the cult of equity, but for gold. Gross has previously talked down leveraged finance, and now we are entering a deleveraged phase as well.

As a reminder, Marc Faber pointed that gold could go to $1,300 or even lower and that was just last Friday. We again would ask about Bitcoin: What is the value of a Bitcoin if gold’s value is being bombarded?

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