答：當印度人購買黃金，他們不認為他們花錢。在他們的心目中，這是一個儲蓄。在我們的儲蓄帳戶中是購入黃金。這不是一項消費，它是一種投資。
Last night CBS' 60 Minutes aired a great segment on India's penchant for buying gold. I've written a few thoughts below, but first watch the segment:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/
Notes
First, here are a few notes I took from the video:
1.2 billion people in India. 10 million weddings each year in India. Half of the gold bought in India is jewelry for weddings. In India, a family without gold is an "incomplete family."
Indian households save about 30% of their income compared to Americans who save about 5%.
The tradition that a bride's parents will give her gold is a financial burden to some families.
Gold is so important to the lives of Indians that the poor can now get financing for it.
The World Gold Council is funded by a group of mining companies. Its representative in India created the program to help India's poor buy gold.
Q: How can you be both frugal and conservative yet be willing to spend thousands of dollars on gold?
A: When Indians buy gold, they don't think they're spending money. In their minds, that is a savings. That purchase of gold is going to your savings account. It's not an expense, it's an investment.
Indians believe the price of gold will continue rising. It is impossible to tell an Indian consumer that the price of gold will fall, because the belief that gold will continue rising is backed by its past performance.
Observations
To give you an idea of why Indians might view gold's past performance differently than we do, here are two gold charts covering the same period, 1971-2004. The first is in dollars and the second is in rupees.
Gold in India is more than just a store of value. Gold is a visible status symbol of such cultural importance that demand for it apparently exceeds net-production (savings). Some are even willing to borrow money to look like Mr. T, and the mining industry supports this.
To put this in perspective on an aggregated basis, India is importing around $34B in physical gold while running a $150B overall trade deficit. And the trade deficit is still growing, projected to reach maybe $160B this year.
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