| The dollar has lost roughly 97% of its value (per the Fed's own assessment) since the Federal Reserve was created. And that's a good outcome, we could talk about the ruble, or the real, or the bolivar. Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison. Gold has plenty of issues, confidence as a store of value is not one of them. By comparison, the global economy is filled constantly with stories, from one country or another, of fiat being demolished through constant inflation / aggressive devaluation. Countries can drown their citizens via all sorts of schemes involving debt (ala Japan and the Yen), that then become currency devaluation schemes (QE) to debase that debt and chop down the standard of living of its citizens as a stealth move to pay for that debt. Such a thing inherently can't happen with gold. The Euro zone for example is in the middle of seeing its citizens standards of living chopped down via QE, to debase the vast debt that has been choking off the growth potential of much of Europe since 2007 (the European economy has seen zero net GDP growth since roughly 2007). How many Euro zone citizens understand what the ECB is doing to them exactly? Do they realize that what they're about to suffer, is what Americans went through from 2002 to 2014 as the Fed debased the dollar to try to avoid multiple recessions, leading to a substantial decline in the US standard of living? If the ECB drops the value of the Euro by 1/3 via QE, that substantially reduces in real terms the standard of living of anyone living on that currency. Gold shields against that abuse. |
Sure, in the long run, gold holds its value, though it doesn't perform nearly as well as stock markets, or real estate. In the long run, a predictable 2% annual inflation erodes the value of savings, which is why people participating in the dollar economy tend to put their money in bank accounts paying interest rather than burying their cash in vaults,
But it's economically illiterate to pretend that gold price crashes haven't been a far more serious wealth destroyer over the last couple of years than the relatively stable and predictable inflation in developed countries, despite all the predictions that QE was going to make the sky fall in.