That's a gross misrepresentation of reality. It gives the false impression that gold prices always increase, which is not the case. Gold is a volatile asset, i.e., it's a relatively risky investment.
It took 8 years for gold to recover from circa 2012 drop. 8 years is twice as long as S&P 500 took to recover from 2008 financial crisis. More importantly, see the 1980 high. It took 26 years to get back to the same point. Anyone considering investment should adjust their expectations accordingly.
That’s because no one prints headlines that read “Gold has been in a trading pattern for the past six months, 15% below its ATH”, or at least that headline didn’t stick in your mind like “ATH!!!” does.
As a sibling comments outlines, gold is actually quite volatile and risky versus returns, and your returns will very much depend on when you bought it.
If it appears to you that "gold is pretty much always appreciating", that's a function of your perspective, similar to the phenomenon where, sometimes, when you're standing on railroad tracks, a faraway train looks bigger and bigger and bigger if you just stand there and watch. In this case what is happening is that the value of whatever you're using to measure the gold's value, probably dollars, is depreciating.
Gold's value is pretty volatile in the short term, though, so in fact most of the time gold is not at an all-time high, even measured in dollars. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F..., for example, you'll see that gold didn't reach its high of 02011 again for about 9 years, and didn't reach its high of 01980 again for 27 years, until the subprime mortgage crisis in 02007. To me it looks like the recent periods that gold has reached a nominal all-time price are roughly 01968–01975, 01979–01980, 02008–02011, the first half of 02020 when nobody knew what was going to happen with covid, and since Trump got elected. 13 out of the last 60 or so years.
The following plot on that page shows what I mean about inflation; adjusted for the BLS CPI, gold hadn't exceeded its 01980 peak until the last few months, not even in the subprime mortgage crisis.
kmeisthax's shadowbanned graph of oil barrels per gold ounce is also pretty thought-provoking: stable within the 10–35 range from 01946 until 02023, with the stunning exception of 02020 ("The peak in 2020 was driven by COVID-19, which boosted gold prices as a safe haven while oil demand and prices plummeted due to global lockdowns.") https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-gold-t...
And if you look at the inflation-adjusted graph, you'll see that it was up to 2600 dollars if you adjust for inflation ("2024 dollars"), which was already a pretty fancy suit, and within three years it had dropped by 40% before gradually settling to a low of 400–600 "2024 dollars" from 01998 to 02004. As I said, there's a lot of short-term volatility, though not as much as Bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F...
One of the eminently attackable facets of that claim is the varying availability of goods over the millennia, making it impossible to have a really stable and precise measure of value against which to measure gold's purchasing power. You can't buy silphium or Roman concrete today for any price, for example, nor a ticket to a gladiatorial match, and, from a certain point of view, most of the functions fulfilled by handmade Roman togas are today fulfilled by mass-produced machine-stitched US$200 wool suits, or even a cheap sports coat, jeans, and T-shirt. And no amount of gold would have bought you penicillin 100 years ago, much less in Roman times.
Sure, and the greatest thing about modernity is that during the Roman Empire you would have been executed for wearing Tyrian purple, while now anyone who cares to spend the money is entitled.
Despite Sumptuary law's then it was often the case, as it is now, that anyone who cared to spend the money could become a magistrate and wear a stripe of purple, or spend more money to overthrow a ruler and replace them .. going full purple.
Wearing purple signified not only that you could afford purple, it also signified you could bribe censors to allow you to wear purple.
Much like having the latest model of a limited edition sports car today; not only can you afford the car but you can also afford enough shittier models to be moved up the preferred buyer list or otherwise bribe the sales reps.
The problem with the "nice suit" metaphor is that the cost of clothing has actually plummeted since the height of the Roman Empire. Also, they didn't wear suits.
The reason why money printing doesn't immediately translate into lowered dollar value (and thus, higher gold prices) is that other goods and services are getting cheaper around it. If supply is flexible then the price of some goods won't change much, while things with fixed supply will skyrocket in price. That's why we basically didn't see much inflation in the 2010s despite printing shittons of money and having a zero-interest rate policy for most of it. All that money went straight into equities and real estate.
Likewise, there are also goods like oil that are part of basically every supply chain, so when the price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up. Owning gold will not hedge against this kind of inflation. "BuT tHe SuPpLy Of GoLd Is FiXeD!" you say. Yes, but oil has something stronger than a fixed supply: centralized supply. Every oil producing nation in the world is part of a large supply-restricting cartel that has proven to be frustratingly resilient to all the usual things that are supposed to break cartels. They even managed to bring American shale oil producers to heel (because fracking is too expensive to be economic in a cheap oil environment).
As a result, the ratio of gold to oil prices is very volatile[0], way moreso than you'd expect from something sold as an inflation hedge. Because, with few exceptions, everything in the economy runs off oil, you'd expect to see either a fixed line (if oil is as fixed as gold) or a rising line (if oil grows like dollars). Instead we see ups and downs everywhere.
it's so half-assed, why just tack a zero onto the Christian year? in the Yoruba calendar it's 10,067 -- use that and it puts things in a real perspective. We're ten thousand years from the beginning of civilization, not two thousand. Now THAT gives some perspective on the "long now"
Maybe more like twelve thousand years from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe. The real crucial question is whether we're two years from the end of civilization or two trillion.
