> an ounce of gold in Roman times bought a nice suit, and today, an ounce of gold buys a nice suit.
Consequently it's the standard safe store of value investors flee to when the world is in upheaval, a role it has played since well before Roman times. Its price being high is a standard indicator of investors fearing miserable times ahead. See, for example, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-haven.asp or https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/flighttoquality.asp.
If it appears to you that "gold is pretty much always appreciating", that's a function of your perspective, similar to the phenomenon where, sometimes, when you're standing on railroad tracks, a faraway train looks bigger and bigger. In this case what is happening is that the value of whatever you're using to measure the gold's value, probably dollars, is depreciating.
Gold's value is pretty volatile in the short term, though, so in fact most of the time gold is not at an all-time high, even measured in dollars. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F..., for example, you'll see that gold didn't reach its high of 02011 again for about 9 years, and didn't reach its high of 01980 again for 27 years, until the subprime mortgage crisis in 02007. To me it looks like the recent periods that gold has reached a nominal all-time price are roughly 01968–01975, 01979–01980, 02008–02011, the first half of 02020 when nobody knew what was going to happen with covid, and since Trump got elected.
The following plot on that page shows what I mean about inflation; adjusted for the BLS CPI, gold hadn't exceeded its 01980 peak until the last few months, not even in the subprime mortgage crisis.
kmeisthax's shadowbanned graph of oil barrels per gold ounce is also pretty thought-provoking: stable within the 10–35 range from 01946 until 02023, with the stunning exception of 02020 ("The peak in 2020 was driven by COVID-19, which boosted gold prices as a safe haven while oil demand and prices plummeted due to global lockdowns.") https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-gold-t...
Funny how this "long now" date format will stop working in 99999, but the normal way of writing years as integers will keep working just fine.
Maybe more like twelve thousand years from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe. The real crucial question is whether we're two years from the end of civilization or two trillion.
It took 8 years for gold to recover from circa 2012 drop. 8 years is twice as long as S&P 500 took to recover from 2008 financial crisis. More importantly, see the 1980 high. It took 26 years to get back to the same point. Anyone considering investment should adjust their expectations accordingly.
As a sibling comments outlines, gold is actually quite volatile and risky versus returns, and your returns will very much depend on when you bought it.
Nothing fundamental about gold that links it to greed, just it's value and return.
So yes, it tells you something more than "Amount Of Greed". And that may well be "Fear of losses (or even just reduced gains) in the market"
I hear this in housing politics: prices are high because of 'greed!'.
Seems weird that people in San Francisco are so much greedier than people in Houston.
I would take greedy as sort of a constant and try and think about why greedy people are having more or less success in a given place and time.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/28/bullion-bon...
(not to act like im above it all, i still have my gold-plated pokemon jigglypuff trading card from burger king in 1999 and i often use golden paint on model kits).
It s superior to currency because while (for example) the US dollar will always have value as long as you pay taxes with it, there is not a limited supply
It is superior to bartering because while (for example) a chicken has value due to its utility as food, it naturally disappears (because you ate it or it died).
Gold and other precious metals sort of sit in the middle ground as the "next best thing" to almost everything that humans want. So it remains a useful means of preserving and communicating value.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? How come his Bitcoin holdings - now worth more than $100 billion dollars - have remained untouched since 2010? How can any one human resist that kind of temptation? I would be digging landfill sites if I lost my wallet worth $100 billion. The launch of Bitcoin also coincided with the 2008 financial crisis. The first block had the text: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" embedded, etc.
None of the altcoins have this level of myths and legend. You need this kind of supernatural story to start a new fiat, digital gold, religion, and whatever collective fiction you can think of.
That useful property was well known (and notably, other currencies such as shells and precious stones lacked this). In addition as others have said, gold was both scarce and had a low melting point. However, other metals had these properties too, and sure enough, some cultures did anchor their currencies on metals other than gold.
We are not "just instinctively attracted to shiny metals". FHN.
The true value of gold is quite stable over time (since new gold is mined at a slow rate). Fiat currencies are constantly being debased. Hard assets fluctuate up and down relative to gold.
In contrast, Trump has been making noises about wanting to replace Powell as chair of the Fed, because Powell won't dance to Trump's tune. I do not want a world where Trump can determine (even if indirectly) the value of the dollar, or the interest rate, or anything in that vicinity.
So I trust the dollar a lot less than I did six months ago. In contrast, gold doesn't care what Trump's policy is.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/earth/earths-next-mini-moon-...
1) flight from USD assets given views that one cannot depend on US assets as safe havens
2) central banks increasing gold holdings
3) purchases by Chinese investors as they have few places to invest their money
4) concern around debt levels deficits and democratic process ability to fix this
5) concerns around central bank independence, and hence inflation targeting, being undermined for political motivations
I have personally bought a lot of gold after having been a long term US equities investor because of its risk-off and zero duration nature. In a world of stock bubbles, high valuations, and general economic uncertainty, leaning risk-off has been where I currently feel comfortable. In a world of inflation being in zero duration is a sensible place to be.
I keep seeing this but then I also keep seeing the opposite: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/foreigners-buying-us-stocks-r...
- The USD is definitely losing value. That also means stocks from US companies would be cheaper from a foreigner's point of view.
- That means it represents good investment opportunity as long as the fundamentals of those companies are not affected too much (e.g. AI companies not directly affected by workers' raid, or pay tarrifs). Nothing is contradictory here.
Central banks could reduce their balance sheets significantly more (and until recently the pace was pretty quick), but given where things are today it will undoubtedly be pretty politically unpalatable to do so (bond markets puking, making deficits even worse in the face of an inability to cut spending).
Actually we’ve shifted into authoritarianism and confidence has only worsened.
So then the question is - how long can this continue before something snaps
This, in itself, doesn't mean anything profound. There's nothing to "snap" if the expectation of stable, modest inflation is baked into the markets. Fiat currencies usually implode only when something else undermines the confidence in the issuing government.
In other words, we have two different inflations happening at once, leading to people who happened to own the right assets getting richer and everyone else getting poorer. I don't think that's what an efficient market would do, which implies that efficiency will kick in at some point and BOOM
Have a look at the CPI-adjusted gold chart, and think back to how awful things were (or weren't) in 2011.
So it's part of the story, money losing value in the real economy. That's been happening since moving off the gold standard at roughly similar rates.
There's something that happened during ZIRP & Negative Real Interest Rate Policies that completely divorced the value of money in the real economy from the value of assets & future cash flows, and even when interest rates became positive again, the trend appears to have continued.
Perhaps all investors just believe ZIRP & Negative Real Interest Rate Policies are coming back, maybe to even more negative real rates than ever before.
How do you measure this? What is this claim founded in?
You could indeed say that inflation should be defined by the asset prices. This would couple fiat and asset prices definatorically.
Apparently consumables have become incredibly cheap.
But then again, consumables will like start to rise in price now people need more money to buy a house, etc.
You could also say that real salaries have gone down a lot, which is probably also true.
These effects have to go through very complex value chains.
I'm assuming you are referring to CPI, but that is just a single measure of inflation and serves a very specific purpose. One could argue that "real" inflation in fact is the US dollar's value relative to gold or other similar assets.
The rich people expect a return rate regardless of how expensive the asset was, and eventually the asset will have to give that. This transaltes into more expensive consumables, rents, etc. Ie, Asset prices are a part of the real economy.
I’m not sure I follow. The USD is just a medium of exchange. 100% of the dollars commands 100% of the wealth of the economy. If you increase the number of dollars but the size of the economy itself doesn’t increase then the underlying prices would go up and the value of individual dollars would go down.
But really none of it is as objective as it tries to pretend to be.
As always, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate_(United_State...
Seems like anyone who buys or sells gold at any other price is questioning it.
The book is highly researched and explains the pattern we're in, and what we'll see next.
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Navigating-Big-Debt-Crises...
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-reserve-currencie...
It is about certain regimes nearing their end and folks converting assets into something fungible they can use and enjoy while exiled in Geneva, Dubai, Phnom Penh, etc.
As just one example (of many) of why its not about the USD - most global debt is dollar denominated and settled in dollars. Even if they don't reside or transact in the US, most large financial transactions settle (or are hedged) in USD. Again, just one example.
Also, understand export economies like China cannot avoid dollar settlement for goods exported to the US. They can settle in USD and covert to another asset, but only as a secondary step.
I could go on about this, but Carnegie Endowment Prof Michael Pettis explains this and more much better than I can.
It was a presidential election year and consumers were getting squeezed hard by rising energy prices. Russia invaded Afghanistan, Carter suspended participation in the Olympics, and there was a general feeling of concern.
Using Wolfram Alpha to compute gold's price in 1979 relative to 2025, "850.00 1979 dollars in 2025", the result is $3,663.84
Gold closed today at $3,858.60.
Just like 1979, 2025 has a long list of international concerns making investors nervous.
TulliusCicero•1h ago
foxyv•1h ago
jader201•59m ago
Considering most stocks have been equally increasing/at ATH, I’m not sure that’s the reason.
EgregiousCube•56m ago
jeffrallen•53m ago
r_lee•35m ago
this really can't keep going on forever. the weekly "ATH" and everything going up is like a pressure bomb that keeps getting pressurized more and more each day.
And because this is all assets, the more assets you already have, the more you gain. And the central banks/etc. will make sure the party keeps on going for you.
thekoma•58m ago
compumike•54m ago
https://totalrealreturns.com/s/GLD
(Not quite the same due to the compounding 0.40%/year expense ratio of the ETF, but probably close enough for this conversation.)