For a pink paper, one might have thought that the Financial Times would have greater affinity with a yellow metal, but no - its long, tiresome antipathy towards gold staggers on. (If and when the FT ever turns positive on gold, we will know that the high is close at hand.) The latest manifestation of its auric antagonism is James Mackintosh's 'Short View' of 14th October, in which he

"compares gold's climb to other market bubbles"..

Note that reference to "other.. bubbles" as if gold's steady appreciation - merely the flip side of a fast devaluing dollar - was a case-closed proven example of what the OED refers to as "anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty or worthless.. often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes." That sounds a lot more like the global fiat monetary system or like fractional reserve banking than this innocent metal that has outlived every paper currency as a store of value for the past few thousand years. But then the reality is that there are still plenty of people who simply don't get it - which is another reason to think that the "bubble" in gold (and silver) still has plenty of scope for further, erm, inflation.

Mackintosh deploys some nifty chartist legerdemain, overlaying the recent price history of gold against previous bubble outbreaks, such as that of the Roaring Twenties:

One might almost call this yellow journalism (biased opinion masquerading as objective fact). Selective comparisons with prior bubbles are just that - selective. One might just as reasonably overlay the price of gold with the price of the FT itself, which has doubled since 2007, or with the price of an online subscription, which in just over three years has risen from £65 to more than £170. Is the FT a bubble?

David Fuller's view Among the dubious practices involving graphics, and certainly not the sole province of chartists, is the overlay of one instrument with another in a different time cycle. Eoin and I have expressed this view on many occasions and our analytical careers would not be diminished, I contend, if we never saw another overlay with the Dow in 1929, the Nikkei in the 1980s, or any other bubble. Those comparison graphs show us no more than the blindingly obvious point that prices rise until they eventually fall, with little insight as to when, from what level or how far they might reverse.

Gold's uniqueness is that while the price fluctuates in the short to medium term, it has held its value for millennia. Therefore, instead of thinking about how much the price of gold has risen or fallen over a period of time, we would be more informed by viewing it as the closest approximation of a constant, against which the price of other assets and fiat currencies move.