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Using a GED-GARCH model to estimate monthly data from January 1990 to February 2022, we test whether gold acts as a hedge or safe haven asset in 10 countries. With a downturn of the stock market, gold can be viewed as a hedge and safe haven asset in the G7 countries. In the case of inflation, gold acts as a hedge and safe haven asset in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, and Indonesia. For currency depreciation, oil price shock, economic policy uncertainty, and US volatility spillover, evidence finds that gold acts as a hedge and safe haven for all countries.

The central hypothesis to be tested is the relevance of gold in the determination of the value of the US dollar as an international reserve currency after 1971. In the first section, the market value of the US dollar is analysed by looking at new forms of value (financial derivative products), the dollar as a safe haven, the choice of a standard of value and the role of special drawing rights in reforming the international monetary system. Based on dimensional analysis, the second section analyses the definition and meaning of a numéraire for international currency and the justification for a variable standard of value based on a commodity (gold). Then follows the theoretical foundation for the empirical and econometric analysis used later. The third section is devoted to the specification of an econometric model and a graphical analysis of the data. It is clear that an inverse relation exists between the value of the US dollar and the price of gold. The fourth section shows the estimations of the different specifications of the model including linear regression and cointegration analysis. The most important econometric result is that the null hypothesis is rejected in favour of a significant link between the price of gold and the value of the US dollar. There is also a positive relationship between gold price and inflation. An inverse statistically significant relation between gold price and monetary policy is shown by applying a dynamic model of cointegration with lags.

This chapter investigates the nature of the transformation of macroeconomics by focusing on the impact of the Great Depression on economic doctrines. There is no doubt that the Great Depression exerted an enormous influence on economic thought, but the exact nature of its impact should be examined more carefully. In this chapter, I examine the transformation from a perspective which emphasizes the interaction between economic ideas and economic events, and the interaction between theory and policy rather than the development of economic theory. More specifically, I examine the evolution of what became known as macroeconomics after the Depression in terms of an ongoing debate among the “stabilizers” and their critics. I further suggest using four perspectives, or schools of thought, as measures to locate the evolution and transformation; the gold standard mentality, liquidationism, the Treasury view, and the real-bills doctrine. By highlighting these four economic ideas, I argue that what happened during the Great Depression was the retreat of the gold standard mentality, the complete demise of liquidationism and the Treasury view, and the strange survival of the real-bills doctrine. Each of those transformations happened not in response to internal debates in the discipline, but in response to government policies and real-world events.

The issue of risk premium in commodity futures market has long been examined since Keynes’ (1930) normal backwardation hypothesis. We further examine the normal backwardation hypothesis in the gold futures market, using a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) approach. We find no evidence that risk premium exists in the gold futures market over the period 1980–2005. Finally, we provide further explanations as to why there is no risk premium in the gold futures market by investigating the actual gold futures positions taken by gold mining firms. We contend that lack of hedging activity by gold miners may explain the lack of risk premium in gold market.

By employing the GMM and SVAR models in this paper, the effects that bond prices, equity prices, gold prices, and domestic credit have on housing prices were analyzed, using data from 2002q4 to 2015q1 for the ASEAN + 2 countries. The GMM results indicated the significant effects of equity prices and gold prices on housing prices and insignificant effects of bond prices and demotic credit on housing prices in selected Asian countries. Furthermore, findings show that worldwide economic crisis has negative impacts on housing prices in Asian countries. Moreover, Impulse response results indicated that housing prices respond simultaneously and positively to equity prices in all countries except Malaysia and Singapore. Likewise, Variance deposition findings demonstrate the importance of gold prices in fluctuation of housing prices in Malaysia and China especially in the long term.

This chapter examines the dynamic linkages between the returns of Bitcoin, gold, and oil by using daily closing price data between July 17, 2010 and January 8, 2021. This study applies the diagonal BEKK–GARCH model for the purpose of analyzing a volatility spillover of variables in positive or negative ways. The empirical results show that the lagged returns inversely affect their current returns in oil. Based on the return spillovers between Bitcoin and gold, the empirical results indicate a unidirectional return spillover from Bitcoin to gold. Moreover, the authors found a unidirectional return transmission is observed from oil to Bitcoin, implying that oil returns are useful in forecasting Bitcoin returns. These findings are not only valuable for understanding of the interrelationships between the returns of Bitcoin, gold, and oil, but they are also of great interest to portfolio managers, investors, and investment funds that are actively dealing in Bitcoin, gold, and oil.

This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

The chapter presents an overview of major currency and international capital market movements after World War II, showing that the movements brought about by US investments in the fifties and sixties that created the offshore Eurodollar bear resemblance to what is now taking place between the United States as the world's investor and China. International money is created in a triangular process of long and short lending intermediated by short borrowing. The imbalances often recorded on US current account are to some extent counterbalanced by the huge returns accruing to businesses of the west. This follows the “dark matter” theory but with the twist that real value is extracted through foreign direct investment in line with the rationale of Eurodollar flows. However, threats are also created in this way. Rather than in superficial notions of instability in currency markets, the high returns on capital abroad have been instrumental both in the deindustrialization of the west and the maintenance of a high rate of consumption through the financialization of the housing market. The eventual overdrive precipitated the crisis starting in 2007, but the dollar relationship with China continues unabatedly.