Shelter in Uncertainty: Evaluating Gold and Bitcoin as Safe Havens Against G7 Stock Market Indices During Global Crises

This paper investigates the hedging and safe haven capacity of gold and Bitcoin against the G7 stock market indices during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine military conflict, and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Using a novel Quantile-VAR connectedness approach, the results show that, at the median quantile, both gold and Bitcoin act as effective hedges during normal market conditions and strong safe-haven assets during the three crises. Gold emerges as the most prominent safe haven asset, outperforming Bitcoin, especially during the war and the SVB collapse. Among the G7 stock market indices, the Japanese and the American stocks may be used as risk diversifiers during crises. As for the rest of the G7 stocks, they are regarded as “risk-on” investments.  Next, we assessed the robustness of our results at various quantiles. We found them to be generally consistent with the outcomes obtained at the median quantile, with one exception related to the S&P500.The results show that the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war are much stronger than the American banking crisis

Can gold-backed cryptocurrencies have dynamic hedging and safe-haven abilities against DeFi and NFT assets?

Given that the interconnections of NFT and DeFi digital assets with other stablecoins still not sufficiently studied, this paper is two-fold. We first examine the dynamic conditional correlation between gold-backed cryptocurrencies and NFTs and DeFi assets during the period 02/11/2021-05/01/2023. We thereafter assess the diversification potential of gold-backed cryptocurrencies against NFTand DeFi. To this end, we use the time-varying Student's copula to investigate the cross-markets linkages among different assets in dynamic fashion. We afterwards compute the optimal hedging ratios and effectiveness index to better explore the effectiveness of portfolio risk management. Our findings clearly show that the degree of dependence between gold-backed cryptocurrencies and NFT and DeFi tokens tends to vary over time. Our results also display that gold-backed cryptocurrencies act as suitable hedging (or diversifying) assets during normal times. Nevertheless, such assets can be considered as robust safe havens during the 2022 bear market for the most of NFT and DeFi assets. More specifically, PAXG and PMGT are found to be the best safe haven instruments for both NFT and DeFi tokens. DGX also serves as safe-haven assets for some NFT and DeFi assets, but with a lower risk-mitigation capacity compared to PAXG and PMGT. In most cases, DGX tends to act as a strong diversifier. Its hedging feature is only recorded for the NFT Protocol (xNFT) and the DeFi token Chainlink (LINK). Our results are of particular interest to investors and portfolio managers who search for safe havens to mitigate the risk of their NFT and DeFi portfolios