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Originally Posted by samcol
On the short term gold markets are speculative or gambling, on the long term gold does nothing but go up in relation to US dollars. I'm not buying gold to try and make money, I'm buying it to maintain value. And my point is I don't see any of these retirement accounts with the ability to keep up with inflation. Sure you'll see the dollars in your account racking up with intrest, but the buying power of those increases doesn't out weigh the devaluing dollar (short of risky speculation).
100 years ago I could buy a nice middle class house for about 100 Double Eagle Gold Coins (approx. 1 ounce gold, $20 dollar face value). Today I could buy a similar middle class home at today's standards for the same 100 Double Eagle Gold coins. The home from 100 years ago was $2000, today that home is closer to $100,000.
Gold has held it's value for thousands of years. Fiat currencies don't. I don't see how gold is a gamble.
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Sure, and if I bought 2000$ in stock 100 years ago, I would be able to buy 7 houses today at 2% real interest rate.
The value of gold has
collapsed at a number of times in history. Spain had a huge inflationary collapse of a gold currency, for example.
In the period where it hasn't been used as a currency (the last 30 years), it has behaved pretty much randomly in real-value, somewhat correlated with other resources.
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5 years ago:
1 USD = 0.92630 EURO
Today:
1 USD = 0.63070 EURO
Hey look! It went up 46%, clearly Euros are a great investment. I'll just buy Euros, and have them sit around, and earn 8% return per year.
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Or, I'll invest in things that are denominated in Euros, like bonds that produce a return, and earn 8%
plus the return on the bond.
Yes, the US currency is tanking. That doesn't mean all securities or bonds are tanking.