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Message:: [QUOTE="Juan Blanco, post: 1590807, member: 41665"]Every single news item I've found describes this POG Event as a "Bubble." So which "commonly accepted Bubble criteria" are demonstrated, here? 1) "Widespread participation" - None.No evidence is provided, whatsoever: instead PRESUMPTION and MAKE-BELIEVE fill the gap. "American interests" and "private Americans" are assumed to have shorted the Dollar. This assumption is supported only by unattributed hearsay of an anonymous Swiss banker. However, in the next month, it appears President Eisenhower considered prohibiting any Americans from owning Gold abroad. The question remains: how many did, in 1960? In 1969, according to Congressional testimony by the US Post Office: "thousands." In 2011, after years of IRS/Feds wrangling with Swiss banks, 20,000 Americans admitted owning Swiss bank accounts... but about 15,000 live there also. So ~25% of all American Swiss accounts are non-resident, ~5,000 in 2011. Of the "Top 1%" (1.4 mln taxpayers, making over $344,000/year) that's a whopping 0.3671% the 1%ers. It's also much much easier to open a Swiss bank account today, but the threshhold is ~$100k for a numbered account. In 1960, the top 1% were 478,000 Americans making over $ 25,000./year. If we assume the same rate of ownership for Swiss bank accounts, ~1,700 ; aggressively double that, ~3,500. This appears broadly consistent with the US Post Office declaration. Can "widespread participation" be limited to a very small group of American plutocrats? No. There's no evidence supporting that assertion, anyway. 2) "Buying with the heavy use of margin" - Unclear. There's nothing to suggest Americans with Swiss Bank accounts, shifting from Dollars to Gold, traded on margin. An alternate & conflicting explanation, spec traders, does permit this possibility however. How could the two unrelated groups have coordinated? That was virtually impossible, in 1960. Instead, this event appear to be a classic cornered market of a few participants with large account: properly termed a "combination." 3) "Buying simply because the price is going up" - Unlikely or Irrelevant.All articles state a rationale/hypothesis for the 'Gold Bubble' was a belief the Dollar was GOING DOWN. This was a speculative currency trade/Dollar short that proved early or prescient, depending on one's holding period. Many asset-allocation shifts follow similar premises/decisions, if less dramatically than currency bets. On an isolated market overseas, the parabolic move was too sudden and brief, in fact, to permit protracted buying as this point requires. 4) "Parabolic price increase" - Indeed, it was!Not all parabolic price increases are "Bubbles" - a supply squeeze, cornered market, market crisis (various) or currency failure - among other explanations - can all provoke such a parabolic price increase. 5) "Buying distorts other economic activity" - Unclear.This is the poorest criteria, because many speculative events don't 'distort economic activity' at all, rather than skew typical speculative allocation. The 1960 Gold Spike did distort economic activity, however, since the Bank of England had to intervene, the US President worried about the United States currency, and coordinated measures were taken to secure the London Gold market thereafter (The London Gold Pool.) The "$35 an Ounce" Gold fiction effectively crumbled on the markets 11/20/1960; the future float was but a question of time (~7 years later.) 6) "Widespread coverage in the media" - After the fact? Decades later, documentation around the event is still classified.The US media couldn't even properly explain what happened: that the Soviets revealed the foundational instability and weakness of America's Bretton Woods Agreement. <a href="http://mises.org/daily/3325" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://mises.org/daily/3325" rel="nofollow">http://mises.org/daily/3325</a>[/QUOTE]

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