Anyone who’s been seriously securities pricing over the last several years has seen a series of bizarre pricing anomalies in securities as markets have gone from boom to bust- back and forth. Taken individually, any of these pricing anomalies as the market moves would be a challenge to Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) notion that the current price of a security reflects the most current analysis of information regarding that security. EMH proponents have a hard time explaining the internet bubble, or really any security that seems to defy rational explanation.
Still, people put stock in the pricing mechanism of the marketplace and see some wisdom in it. When gold was languishing in comparison to the US Dollar through the 1980s and 90s, the rational explanation was that people no longer felt it was a safe haven. Now, conspiracy minded Libertarians such as myself felt that there was a greater conspiracy at work on the part of the powers that be to get people to believe in the US Dollar as the ultimate safe haven rather than gold. There are certain strange coincidences, such as the decline of the spot price of gold in the wake of most major political news (such as the start of Desert Storm or 9/11) which would be occasions where you would thing it would go up.
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