[Herakles]

"Really, for a currency of last-resort gold hasn't done much, considering the number of destabilizing world events of the last 20 years"

Gold prices have been crushed for the pass 20 years for two reasons;

1. The fed was watching gold and using it as an indicator for inflation; logic was, crush gold and crush inflation,

2. If you read deep you will find that during the period the Fed was crushing gold, other groups were taking the trend and making money off the policy. I seem to remember a scheme where a gold company would have a big bank sell the future and then they would dump gold. Needless to say, they were double humping the price down resulting in artificially low prices because they knew what the Fed was doing.

So, if your data is distorted in the first place don't assume you conclusions are correct - better yet, do poor data analysis and bet the farm, I make money every day from people who never learned to do data analysis; have a hunch, bet a bunch, I need more and some people apparently don't.

I'm not big on gold, just information, but I do know one thing for sure; if something big goes wrong and you are still alive, don't try to use the funny money we now call dollars to barter for anything. People in the East and Mid East are use to things going wrong, they don't live in Pollyanna land.

[Freedom4US]

I agree with you, but regardless of *why*, including manipulation, gold has been a poor investment during times of real crisis as of late, that's all.