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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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If you compare it with Gold - against which the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold Standart - it's a lot worse than just a 50% loss since 2013, more like a 65% of value.
The fall is probably the same in terms of real inflation (as actually felt by people in terms of how much less their money buys) - the official inflation figures understate inflation (probably because the mathematical calculation for GDP involves raw GDP being deflated by inflation, so the less the official inflation is the more politicians can harp about how much they made GDP "grow") and this has been going on for decades, which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s, now can barelly pay the rent of small appartment in a major city.
Which you shouldn't do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other "vibes".
In addition, a lot of the world's gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It's not even used as a direct "investment", it's just a pretty, shiny metal.
You'll never guess why that happened... although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.
In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.
The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren't living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.
In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.
So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker's salary wasn't typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague -- and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world's developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.
(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)
Except this isn't remotely true. For American's you had the 62% home ownership in 1960's for much smaller homes (on average 700 sqft) vs 65% now for an average of 2000sqft. The average American family in 1960 owned 1 vehicle, they now own 2. They went on less vacations, moms typically had to work on top of taking care of the family (little to no daycare), oh and interest rates were much higher as well (on top of that pesky women couldn't even own a home by themselves). Single person living was roughly 10% vs 30% now, oh and those hard working dads often didn't live by a year past retirement. And if you were a minority? You absolutely were f'ed.
Yes, costs are higher now relative to income, but demands also are. Want cheap, you move out to rural areas, but risk you don't have work. The same problem that has been endemic in the US since it's inception.
There is a dangerous underlying logic to this line of reasoning. Treating all technological innovation as an added cost to be borne by the end consumer leads to one inescapable dead end. Yes, sometimes there are actual costs. If so, fine. However, this blanket notion of hedonic price adjustment increases wealth inequality with no end. It isn't a sensible and we should be thankful our ancestors were not so foolish or we'd all be living in trees or caves right now.
62% -> 65% sounds reasonable.
700 sqft on average -> 2000 sqft on average is suspicious though. It's possible stats got skewed by the top 1%, who are today richer than ever before, and own ridiculous amount of property. Median sqft perhaps would be more representative
Thing is, giant mansions existed in the 19th century too. They would've already been affecting the average home size in the 20th century.
The growth AFAIK is largely driven by the suburban mcmansions, which aren't necessarily a 1% thing.
In all fairness I only saw evidence of that for Great Britain because a journalist of The Guardian actually notice that his daughter's salary and his father's salary were the same when inflation adjusted yet bought way less now, so he wrote an article about it.
I've read things that led me to believe that there is a similar situation in the US but I don't know specifically how far the difference is in the US.
More like the price of gold is artificially inflated far beyond any actual value.
The gold price was always artificially inflated. It's just currently higher than normal because a lot of people anticipate a catastrophic end to the AI bubble.
You don't understand what gold is being used for, it's insurance against government printing and is impossible to forge and hard to steal if your not stupid and actually pay for security, unlike things like bitcoin. Its used as the currency for century's for a reason and is often fallen back upon as a last resort for a reason. Silver isn't because it's not as fininite but is good as a more ubiquidous self backed currency for the same reason, just more for the common man.
The reason golds value is so high is because it is the price of combine debts that verious fiat deal could cover over all these years, that's why it's so high. When a debt can't be covered in cash, gold is often sold to make up the diffrence, over time that has caused its price to rise due to it being represented against these assets, it seems people can't get enough of the shiny metal.
I understand it fine. At least the parts of what you said that are true anyway. Much of it is false but even if it weren't, I think you're misunderstanding my meaning.
Gold being used as a currency is ascribing to it an artificial value. It is no different than say, printing a number on a piece of paper and saying that paper is now valuable. It's a rock that we take out of the ground. If we tried as hard to dig up gold as we do digging up oil, we might eventually dig it all up in a few thousand years.
Oil has value because we use it for all kinds of crap. It's so useful we also trade it because it's valuable. This is true of every other commodity. Gold has so far outpaced its actual industrial value it's functionally just another currency, victim to the same manipulations as any other currency.
The alternative view is that the real value of government issued currencies has fallen and Gold just kept going along with its 1.2% yearly inflation due to gold mining.
That the official currencies buy less and less (as I pointed) leans more towards the view that the value of government issued and controller currencies is being inflated away much faster than the value of an ancient currency which is not controlled by any government and only devalues by more of it being mined.
In other words, at medium and long time frames Gold is not an investment asset, it's a store of wealth outside the control of politicians.
If there is more gold, it's value should go down. The price should only go up when supply becomes limited, or some new thing demands more than usual.
Gold has a lot of practical use, but because it's value is hyper inflated it is almost always more cost effective to use a cheaper material. Which, incidentally, is driving the cost of those materials up.
I'm not saying gold should be the same price as copper. I am saying that in a rational environment the prices should be comparably similar.
As it is, gold is 10,000 times as expensive as copper.
You're thinking of Gold as a consumer good, I'm thinking of Gold as a currency which is what traditionally gold has been. Even nowadays very little gold is actually consumed (it's used in small quantities for things like wiring inside a microchip package the pads of the dies to the package pins).
When a cross-currency exchange rate changes all that you know for sure is that the relative value of a currency has changed vs that of a different currency - maybe one currency went up in worth, maybe the other currency went down in worth, maybe both at the same time, maybe both went down at different speeds, maybe both went up at different speeds.
It's exactly because "if there is more gold, it’s value should go down" AND gold has being up in quantity by about 1.2% per year due to mining, that I'm saying that the movement of the cross-currency exchange rate of the GLDUSD pair is more easilly explained by the fall in value of the US Dollar rather than by some greater worth of Gold.
It makes sense that the currency that nowadays is mainly created when banks lend money (as explained in the Bank Of England paper "Money Creation in the Modern Economy") would lose value way faster than the currency that's created when more of it is mined and mining only adds around 1.2% to its amount in human hands per year.
I'm actually saying that Gold is going down in value, it's just that the Dollar, Euro and most other paper currencies are going down in value even faster so the cross-currency exchange rates between Gold and those currencies are such that the same amount of Gold can buy more of those currencies.
Well, you see, you got the consequence right but you didn't go back enough enough in analysing the causal chain to get to the root causes - gold price vs the price of inferior alternatives for many of its uses, such as Copper, is at its root what it is because there is way less Gold in the Earth's crust that we can mine than there is Copper as you can see here (note that the vertical scale is logarithmic).
Copper is between 100,000 and a million times more abundant than Gold.
Per your logic Gold should be at least 100,000x more expensive than Copper, not just 10,000x.
In Human History stuff that is rare and doesn't decay tends to become a store of value - at one point even Aluminum was a store of value because it was rare since the process to extract it from Bauxite handn't been invented yet.
This also means that if suddenly some way to mine way more Gold is found (say, asteroid mining), its price will collapse vs things that don't benefit from it, similarly to what happened to Aluminum when the process to get it from Bauxite was invented.
It's the modern government issued currencies whose tokens are not themselves rare materials (the so-called "paper currencies") or a stated guaranteed IOU for a rare material (such the USD was during the Gold standard when the USD was legally tradable for Gold by the US Government at a fixed rate) that are in Historical terms unusual and very recent (less than a century old). For me it makes sense that any weird movements in the exchange rate between Gold and government issued currencies is more likely explained by issues with these "recent" inventions rather than issues with what was a currency for millenia.
Even with a fixed money supply, prices are still set by a formula that accounts for the velocity of money, or how often any particular unit of money is spent (I spend a dollar at the store, who spends the dollar with a supplier, who spends the dollar by paying a worker, who spends the dollar and so on and so forth). It also accounts for the total economic production.
Peg the whole thing to a semi fixed supply of gold and the prices can still change drastically with shifts in the velocity of money or total aggregate production. That's why fiat currency is good, so that the central bank can pull on different levers to try to keep prices stable, even as different things are happening.
Two points:
I think I failed so far at explaining myself mainly by talking too much.
My point is simple: gold and fiat currencies are roughly the same, but gold isn't issued by anybody and isn't managed by anybody whilst fiat currencies are, so gold is less exposed to the risks inherent to greed and corruption of those who issue and manage currencies - there's not temptation to "issue more gold" because it's not at all possible, there is nobody deciding "gold interest rates" because there is no such thing (to have interest you need to have more money tomorrow than you have today, as today's loan will be repaid tomorrow plus interest and you can't really make more gold any faster than mining it)
Gold has less exposure to Politicians and Central Banks - that's it, that's the important difference.
In stable times when living in mature Economies, that difference is pretty much irrelevant, in times like now it can make a huge difference which is probably why the GLDUSD exchange rate took of with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and accelerated even more with Trump's second mandate as POTUS.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with that paper.
I'm not arguing that we have a fixed money supply. I was saying that if we were on a gold standard, in an alternative universe hypothetical, where the money supply was close to fixed, we would probably see worse price volatility.
Oh, yeah, Gold seems to fail miserably as a trade token in a growing economy.
However I'm not making the case that Gold should replace fiat currencies, I'm making the case that Gold is a good long term store of value in times of large political risks such as the ones we seem to be going through in the West right now (most notably in the US, though the explosion in wealth inequality and growth in the Far-Right is far from only there) as well as during economic crashes with global impact (such as what's likely to happen when the AI bubble blows), whilst even the currencies of major stable countries are much less so.
There's not going to be a "Brexit" impacting Gold as Brexit impacted the GBP or an end of the dominance period of the nation issuing Gold as there is sure to be for the USD.
Currencies are arbitrary. Gold has some industrial value, but essentially no utility to own.
Imagine the global economy collapses, and you have 100 tons of gold - what good will it do you?
Currencies have value based on what you can exchange them for - that is why dollars (and euros and all fiat) are valuable. People will give me things I want if I give them some paper. Gold as a currency is the same, but only as long as people value it. Exactly the same as fiat. It being limited only affects the per-unit PRICE assuming some value, it doesn't give it value to begin with.
Again, you stopped your logical analysis before you got to the end of the logical chain.
Gold differs from fiat currencies in that it cannot be inflated away by politicians and central bankers.
That's it.
It's everything as you wrote AND gold's value over the mid and long term isn't really controlled by politicians or central bankers because they can't issue more of it, which they can with fiat currencies - since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Gold in average just putters along losing 1.2% of value a year, not really caring about the quality of politics in any country.
So holding Gold rather than EUR, USD, GBP or so on is really just trying to protect oneself from Economic mismanagement of currencies.
Everything as you wrote applies and anybody thinking that Gold will hold value if society collapses is a fool.
You could do the same protection against political mismanagement in your own native currency by holding your savings in other currencies, but that comes with the extra work of having to track the quality of politics and Economic management in the countries issuing those currencies (as by holding those currencies you're now exposed to the political fuckups there), plus main currencies tend to be highly positivelly correlated during big Economic Crashes (like in 2007 when all main currencies suffered and maybe only the CNY didn't suffer as much), whilst Gold is not and just does its thing.
As it so happens putting my savings in Gold has already done exactly that: when I lived in Britain I put my savings in Gold and then Brexit came and the British Pound crashed 20% and suddenly my Gold would buy me 20% more British Pounds. It wasn't really Gold going up in value, just the pound going down. Mind you, my savings in EUR did the same, but that wasn't a major international Crash, were the EUR would suffer as much as the GDP or the USD.
Just like there was no Brexit effect on Gold, there is no Trump Effect on Gold or Realestate Bubble effect - the price of houses in GLD has actually been pretty stable, might even have fallen a little bit.
That's the point of it, nothing else. All the bollocks about Gold replacing fiat currencies and so on is just fanboyism from goldbugs - Gold is just an investment class that has less correlation with the quality of Economic management in the largest nations than the currencies of those nations or anything listed in those currencies (such as stocks or realestate).
Citation needed. You'll find that not only can this happen, it has. Arguably this is currently happening. They can't just make more appear, but if that were the only thing driving it's value up, again, it's price over time would go down as we continue to extract more of it than we realistically need.
If you're worried about the collapse of currency, gold is a particularly bizarre investment. If the currency isn't worth anything, you wouldn't buy any of it with your gold. The people with currency aren't going to want gold, they will want things like food, and shelter.
Notably, during the several hyperinflation crises we can point to to study, at no point in any of them did citizens resort to using gold. They bartered with common crap that everyone needed.
That's assuming the worthless paper you have that says you own gold could ever actually be traded for gold in such a situation. Unless you have the physical actual factual gold in your possession, you just have a gold backed currency. Which is doubly worthless in an inflation crisis.
You do at least have the paper right? You don't just own numbers in an app?
You need a citation for the Physics of the creation of elements in the Periodic Table?!
I'm not the person you were arguing with before.
You are talking about prices, I am talking about value. While you have clearly read plenty of libertarian monetary policy primers, you aren't prepared to discuss this topic beyond that level.
Value does not come from rarity. It comes from utility - what a thing can do - and desire - how much other people want it.
Gold has a small amount of utility and a large amount of desire. Fiat currencies have a small amount of utility (namely paying taxes to avoid jail time) and a large amount of desire.
You rail and rail against inflationary monetary policy as if it is some inherent evil of fiat currency. The money supply can be reduced, just as it can be increased, just the supply of gold can change. It doesn't change the source of value, only the price.
Either:
I'm talking within the second value framework, so where trade tokens and wealth stores only have valuable as long as people think they have value and their value only is as much as people think they are worth - in other words their value derives from people's trusting them to have value.
My point is entirely that there are more people in this world capable of reducing and even destroying the trust (and hence how much people are willing to exchange for them) on fiat currencies than there are of gold - fiat currencies are issued and controlled by governments, hence are a lot more subject to political interference than gold which is not issued or controlled by any government.
(My entire perspective is basically a financial risk exposure analysis on fiat currencies and gold as if they were assets just like all other assets, which concludes that gold has smaller political risks than even the major and most stable currencies. Whilst for major currencies usually the difference is too little to matter, in times like now with a bunch of bubbles - like the AI bubble - at the brink and the US Economy in a consistent downwards trajectory, that higher exposure of fiat to such risks is a lot more important - mismanagement of the crash or even as we see now with Trump of international confrontations is likely to hit fiat currencies much harder than gold)
One can think within the first value framework, but that's pretty useless in modern society because that's not how humans are operating, though it would make sense for a society with bartering only.
My talk about inflation was just an attempt at providing a mathematical perspective on it because I have some experience in Finance and a background in Science hence tend to see and explain via the perspective of Mathematics, but I guess that only made things more confusing.
If you compare it with bitcoin it's even worse. Both aren't great comparisons, the US left the gold standard so long ago it's not a meaningful comparison.
But that wouldn't be a fair comparison. The prices of gold and dollars are stable. Bitcoin was invented in 2009 and is still in price discovery.
That's because the Bretton Woods system set the price of gold to $35 per troy ounce. It would be dumb to pay more than $35 per ounce on the market because you could just exchange $35 for an ounce of gold from the government.
Gold is just massively inflated compared to the USD because people do not understand the benefit of fiat currency.
I find it hard to believe that people actually think gold is less volatile than the USD when it has inflated in "value" by 12,516.60% in the last 50 years. If you don't think that the vast majority of that increase isn't due to over speculation then I have a bridge to sell you.