Wall Street Journal joins brokers in trying to talk investors out of gold

Some day these guys will be right. But like real estate, it takes at least a few years after cool heads start talking te bubble down for it to pop. In the case of real estate, contrarians started warning significantly in 2003 -- 3 years before the bubble started to burst and 4 before the public fully fessed up to that and the slide gained serious momentum.

Of course, in the case of real estate, we knew that prices were (on average) about 30% above historical trend in the US, so the fundamental excesses were easy to see and measure. In the case of gold, gold is still well below keeping pace with historical inflation rates, and allocations are absurdly low (as one can see from the anecdote about a broker selling gold when the portfolio allocation had reached a mere 3.5%).