It’s not clear what conclusion should be drawn from the raft of favorable gold articles recently, the latest being the New York Times story In a Gold Lovefest, Shades of 1980 that, despite what you might think from the title, is wildly bullish about the metal.

This follows a troika of stories from last week at the Wall Street Journal and Reuters that similarly fawned over the metal’s recent rise:

• Asian investors stricken by gold fever on record price – Reuters
• Gold Push Unlikely to Be Scrapped – WSJ($) (alternate link)
• Why Gold Won’t Soon Crash – WSJ($) (alternate link)

In my view, we’re still nowhere near the top for the gold price and, while exiting long-term gold positions isn’t something that I’ve yet considered seriously, articles like the ones above appearing in Money Magazine would compel me to rethink that promptly.

Of course, all the recent interest in gold has really been driven by changing views about the increasingly shaky paper money that the world has been using in recent decades and, in the latest in a long series of articles about gold and money, Judy Shelton offers what is clearly the best paragraph about the two in recent memory in this story at The Weekly Standard:

Under a gold standard, money regains its primary purpose as a vital tool of free markets instead of serving as a corrupted instrument of government policy. Genuine economic growth​—​as opposed to the money illusion of artificial wealth reflected in bloated equities or housing prices​—​is no longer sacrificed to monetary policy encumbered by the fiscal failures of government.

Clearly, a gold standard is no panacea, but paper money does look more and more like a “corrupted instrument of government policy” each and every day…