Everywhere You Look the “Smart Money” is Buying Gold Everywhere you look the “Smart Money” is buying gold at a frenetic pace.
That term, “Smart Money,” gets thrown around a lot, so I’ll be more explicit...
I mean people who have made billions of dollars investing.
George Soros, whose net worth is estimated at $25 billion, for example, and his former partner Stan Druckenmiller, who’s worth $4.4 billion.
John Paulson, who graduated from obscurity to legend when he used credit default swaps to bet against the U.S. mortgage market in 2007, netting $4 billion. Since then, his fortune has ballooned to more than twice that.
I’m talking about Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager Forbes estimates to be worth $2.2 billion.
All of these gentlemen are loading up on gold.
It’s rapacious. It’s almost as if they’re trying to corner the market.
So what is their motive? What do they know that you don’t?
I’ll tell you…
China’s Collapse
Last year, George Soros dumped 37% of his U.S. stocks and put $475 million into Barrick Gold, one of the largest miners in the world. He then sold that stake and went straight to the source, buying 240,000 shares of the SPDR Gold Trust ETF.
His motivation might surprise you.
It’s China.
Soros believes that China’s economy is poised to crash after years of sky-high growth.
He has a strong case,
See, the problem with China’s growth is that much of it is debt-based. The government basically gives money to banks and encourages them to dole out loans even to unworthy borrowers. This rapid extension of credit has created a huge debt bubble.
At 277% of GDP, China has the highest level of corporate debt in the world.
And its national debt load stands at roughly $23 trillion — five times what it was a decade ago, and more than two and a half times the size of the country’s entire economy.
This has Soros fearing a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.
“There is an eerie resemblance to what’s happening in China to what’s happened here leading up to the financial crisis in 2007-2008 and it is similarly fueled by credit growth,” Soros said. “It’s eventually unsustainable. But it feeds on itself and it has a lot to do with real estate,” he said.