2024-08-24 05:07:52
The price of gold has hit a record high of $2,500. A gold bar is now worth more than a million dollars. A good time to sell gold?
The price of gold has been rising steadily for several months. Now it has set a new record. On Tuesday, a troy ounce of gold, which is about 31.1 grams, cost around 2,530 US dollars on the London Precious Metals Exchange – the equivalent of around 2,280 euros.
Private investors who have gold in their vaults can therefore look forward to record values. A 100-gram bar was worth $8,130 (around €7,300). The amounts are even more impressive when you look at the bars that the central banks usually have stored in their vaults, especially the German Bundesbank.
After the American Federal Reserve, Germany’s central bank has the second largest stock of gold bars in the world. One such bar weighs a good 12.6 kilograms. On the day of the price record, one of the bars was worth just over a million dollars (around 900,000 euros).
Gold is officially considered a currency reserve. At the end of 2023, the Bundesbank owned an impressive 267,773 gold bars. The vaults therefore contain a gigantic value of 267,773,000,000 – 267.7 billion – US dollars. That is roughly the same as Portugal’s gross domestic product in 2023.
More than half of the Bundesbank’s gold bars are stored in vaults in Frankfurt am Main. The rest are kept at the central banks in New York and London. The two metropolises are considered wholesale centers for gold – so the precious metal could be quickly turned into money there in an emergency.
Anyone who sells their gold now can probably make a profit. These are tax-free if you have owned the physical gold, i.e. bars or coins, for more than a year. However, whether a sale is worthwhile for you depends on individual factors. You could consider selling if:
However, if you did not buy gold as an investment but rather for security reasons – in other words, to sleep more soundly in uncertain times or to know that you have an inflation-proof investment in your safe – you should weigh things up carefully and listen to your gut feeling.
As with the stock market, the same applies to the price of gold: there is no reliable forecast. However, financial experts from various banks and asset managers see the possibility that the price of gold could continue to climb. The reasons given include:
However, if the situation calms down, some believe a correction is possible. Basically, the price of gold is determined by supply and demand, although supply cannot be expanded at will because gold has to be laboriously mined. According to the World Gold Council, the strongest demand is from the jewelry industry, followed by professional investors and central banks.