LBMA 2010: "Back to the Future"

``"When I started in precious metals in the early '80s," said one head of metals trading to the 500+ delegates on Tuesday morning, "I understood that private clients would hold around 3% of their wealth in gold bars and coin... But over the next 20 years, those reserves were really liquidated, down to pretty much zero by 2000... " gold has yet to capture the real investment dollar of even those people closest to it... the relative lack of investor hoarding hardly smacks of gold's being a bubble. And while the Western world's biggest central banks hold huge quantities of the stuff, the world's biggest foreign exchange holders are all "underweight gold by any measure" ... with a growing desire at least to address their "overweight Dollars" position... Standard Chartered's head of metals sees gold investment holdings only now starting to recover from the wipe-out caused by two decades of strong interest rates and economic growth between 1980 and 2000. ''