Rather than go on the gold standard for our currency maybe we should go on the oil standard.
You probably know this but oil can't be used for this purpose because oil is a useful commodity, unlike Gold which has no useful purpose for the investors.
Gold just happens to be a metal which isn't too useful, but is considered nice-looking, is easy to shape, and has a "history" of being important. That, and it happens that it's discovery rate remarkably matched the economic expansion/population growth.
If someone finds a billion pounds of gold in a new mine somewhere tomorrow, all the "theories" of gold won't protect the holders from disaster.
Conversely, no matter how much gold there is, if some day the child yells "the emperor has no clothes", and people actually believe it, gold will go the way of the beanie baby.
In the meantime, expect to read stories like this, and hear arguments like this, with great regularity. After all, for gold to go up in value, you need to build up demand.
And somehow, even with all the asians "buying up all the gold", we still can purchase it for what is apparently a fire-sale price, according to the hype.
Meanwhile, I've been an adult for about 25 years now, and at no time in my life has gold been a good long-term investment. I could buy my gold class ring today for a FRACTION of what it would have cost me when I graduated, taking into account inflation.
On the other hand, if I had invested all my money in a large storage tank of gasoline, I could retire today.