Spreading across the Internet like a wildfire is the Bloomberg release that “Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., the third-largest U.S. life insurer by 2008 sales, has bought gold for the first time in 152 years to hedge against further asset declines.”
“Gold just seems to make sense; it’s a store of value,” Chief Executive Officer Edward Zore said in an interview following his comments at a conference hosted by Standard & Poor’s in Brooklyn. “In the Depression, gold did very, very well.”
Although many gold investors do not need validation to make them feel good about their gold investments, other investors like to know that such an esteemed institution as Northwest Mutual shares their feelings about how to protect against potential declines in the value of the dollar.
The insurance behemoth has accumulated about $400 million in gold; Zore did not disclose Northwestern’s plans for future gold investing.
