High life
Gold rush
Taki
Six months ago the chairman of FIAT, Gianni Agnelli, flew to Switzerland to visit Andre Mayer, a Lazard Brothers senior partner, a self-made financial wizard, and the man that the very, very rich and influential used to go to for advice when they needed to become richer or acquire more influence. Agnelli, however, was not there for such purposes. He knew that Mayer was dying and took time off a busy schedule to visit an old friend. Mayer was as tough as ever. He thought that the Italian was there seeking advice. 'Sell everything Gianni,' he said, 'and buy gold, And I mean everything. Go into hock if you have to.'
The FIAT boss, as head of one of the world's great companies, does not speculate as much as other tycoons. Nor is he as greedy, He chatted on and did nothing about the advice he was gratuitously given. Six months later Mayer died. By the time of his death the price of gold bad risen to nearly 400 dollars from 195 dollars. Needless to say, Mayer, although he knew his days were numbered, had made a killing.
Everyone is talking about gold these days, and no one more than the rich. It is gold fever all over again except that this time, 130 years later, they are dying from heart attacks, not by the arrow, and are pursuing this most precious of metals by telex and telephone rather than by covered wagon. In New York it seems that bars are doing an overflow business as soon as the markets shut, with hundreds of scared and sweating speculators trying to forget their new-found wealth or, as is the case more frequently, trying to forget the fact that they could have got into gold sooner. Greed has no limits, especially in New York. Switzerland is just as bad because of the foreigners living there. Here in London, as always. people do tend to act in a rather more civilised manner than elsewhere, with the result that gold fever, although the main topic of cOnversation everywhere, is at times momentarily forgotten, especially during the shooting season. But the rich are definitely confused these days. Suddenly the value of their money is being jerked around by the price of gold, and unless they are like Stavros Niarchos, who at last count I believe had 500 million dollars' worth of the metal, they don't like it.
I sat with a recently knighted gentleman, a businessman who possesses that rarest of qualities among businessmen these days, honesty, and I heard the most harrowing of tales. Harrowing, because if it is true, the Arabs will have us by the short ones even more than they. do already. We were at Aspinall's and this nameless knight told me that Fort Knox contained only one half the number of tons of gold that it was thought to hold. If this is true, the West as we know it will cease to exist. If it is not, someone is trying to get my newly knighted friend to buy gold. He is aware of both possibilities, so we had a very uncomfortable dinner, with him twice as uncomfortable as me.
As everyone knows, gold has become important because those camel drivers down south and around Mayfair and Kensington, keep .raising the price of oil. We keep paying them, they deposit what we pay them in our banks, and then they discreetly let the right people know that they might – just might – pull the money out again and fail to recycle it into our economy. At which point people get nervous, turn white, and turn also to gold. If the camel drivers – for either political or economic reasons —carried out their threat, the repercussions would be awesome. When I was in Greece just after the war, I had a special lightweight suitcase which I filled with money in order to pay for my sandwiches at school, Imagine what it would mean having to pay cash for yacht crews, private planes, houses, staff, etc once our dusky friends had pulled the rug from under us. So gold fever will continue until the Arabs run out of oil or until we have the guts to make them drink it. But until that happens, buy gold.
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