Some people are predicting “to the moon...” or even beyond.
The 10 trillion or so national debt divided by the couple hundred million ounces (they say) we have comes out to the neighborhood of $53,000 per ounce.
There is less than one ounce of gold per person on the planet.
Same thing for silver.
DYODD.
I have always struggled with understanding gold value. Perhaps you can educate me. I'll accept your premise that there is less than one ounce of Au per person on the planet. And much like a Honus Wagner baseball card, that scarcity can certainly drive value.
But in a working economy (let's assume the global financial infrastructure collapses and we descend into chaos while a new economy develops), where is the value in gold? The value still appears to be arbitrary (unlike fiat money which is at least "backed" by institutions capable of making things happen).
Forgive the rambling, but if I own a garage full of gold bricks, and the rest of the country is impoverished (no gold bricks), am I counting on some sort of reversion to humans liking shiny objects?
I understand the industrial uses of gold. But if fiat monetary systems fail, am I to expect a new economy to spring up with scales measuring to the micron on every store counter to count my gold in a transaction?
I am absolutely not being sarcastic; it just doesn't make sense to me. I would think platypus bills are even more rare than gold. Why stock up on gold and not those?