Might be a semantic quibble, but I wouldn’t qualify flight to safety as speculative. Certainly a speculative element capitalizing on the trend, but the trend itself wasn’t.
The artificial, fixed price in place since the Depression was clearly too low in the eyes of a domestic market prevented from buying and holding it. Never did it return to that level.
Maybe a buying opportunity combined with a nearly concurrent economic upheaval just snowballed. Sort of going through the same thing now, although the medium term economic outlook is pretty bad by any standard. Even in light of that, gold seems peaky at the current level to me.
I don’t have the nerve to buy any at this level, certainly. I doubt I’m alone, so barring some major shock, I’m doubting the aggressive upward projections as wishful thinking by people who hold precious metals, and hawking the sale of it by people who want more money.
I agree with your point concerning the government controlled price of gold.
The 24-fold increase is clearly a political distortion, not a financial one.
I tried to find the 1970 “market rate” for gold jewelry, but nothing relevant popped up.
Despite my comments, if I had any discretionary funds at the moment, I would buy gold on every dip.
The macro economic picture is utterly shocking to my eye.
The Fed is destroying our currency - we have trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities - American voters in both parties show a higher and higher tolerance for wealth destroying socialism - and millions of new USA citizens vote massively for Democrats and lack the job skills and education to contribute meaningfully to the tax base.
I've been a student of business and politics for almost 50 years.
For the first time in my life I don't see how America can grow, innovate, or legislate its way out of this mess.