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HAVING TROUBLE explaining to your financial advisor why you might want to make a Gold Investment today? asks Adrian Ash at BullionVault. (A version of this article first appeared this week in the Financial Times' FT Advisor.)

You could do worse than pointing out that, whatever your financial advisor's stance on gold today – long, short or indifferent – the recent run towards $2000 per ounce begs the question: How did this unyielding, industrially useless lump get here?

Yes, gold has more than doubled in price since the first interbank credit crunch. Yes, it's only attracted more headlines, and more investment Dollars, as the crisis mutates. But gold had already trebled by mid-2007 from its 2001 low. If that was a warning of trouble ahead, then investors, savers and their financial advisors might rightly ask what the 2011 rise – and more recent sell-off – signals.

This Gold Investment bull market's birth, a decade ago, has been variously attributed to gold's "trinket price" base, the geopolitical fears sparked by Y2K and then 9/11, cycled investment flows as the Tech Bubble burst, and the acceleration of the United States' twin deficits. In terms of both consumer goods and business assets, however, gold now stands well above its historic averages. Next year's US presidential campaigns may see gold politicized as the hollow call for a Gold Standard grows. But for now, Gold Investment remains a monetary, not political phenomenon, as the daily spot price's lacklustre response to both 2008's South Ossetia stand-off and the 2011 Arab Spring show......READ MORE