Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well you are absolutely right. Gold is now flirting with the price of a thousand dollars an ounce. That even a few years ago would seem almost inconceivable. And your questions are right on mark. I think the why is that gold has always been viewed as an alternative to currency or more specifically the U.S. dollar. So when investors get a little jittery about the U.S. dollar, often times they will increase their holdings of gold. And of course, we've had issues with the U.S. dollar recently, really over the last three or four years in terms of its international value going down. So we would expect to see as the dollar's international value has gone down, more people have flocked to gold. And as they do so, because gold is of limited supply - it increases in quantity very slowly each year - the price tends to respond very greatly to increases in buying. Now in terms of whether the run is over? Actually gold is not at an all-time high. When you adjust for inflation, which you always need to do when you're comparing prices over time, gold would actually have to hit two thousand dollars an ounce for it to set a record. So that is why some gold bugs, so to speak, say that we will see further increases in the price of gold."