Hard to accept the idea of “gold as USA money.”
Seems more like a speculative investment.
From 1970-1980:
(1) USA gold prices increased 24 times.
(2) USA oil prices increased only 11 times.
(3) USA Consumer Price Index increased only 2.12 times.
And, as noted by another post, USA gold prices collapsed after 1980, but there was no corresponding USA deflation.
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.