this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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Gold to usd lost 30% since 2013
Gold to EUR too I guess? ๐ค No clue how that works.
Yeah, pretty much the same.
(Mind you, I personally went into Gold at around 2013 after having experienced the 2007 inside the Finance Industry, and back then I used British Pounds, and Gold did not give a shit about Brexit but the British Pound sure did - by crashing 20% - so in pounds Gold is actually a bit better than vs USD or EUR)
That said, I look at it the other way around - Gold is the original currency and one that can't be devalued at will by governments (its only inflation comes from gold mining, which increases the amount of gold in circulation by, last I checked 1.2% a year), so it's not Gold price going up, it's the value of government issued currencies going down vs the more traditional currency that's not controlled by any one government which is Gold.
Certainly this seems closer to how people have felt inflation in at least the major paper currencies - back in the 60s a single blue collar salary was enough for a good house, a car and the expenses of a familiy of 5, now a white collar salary it's barelly enough for a single person to live in a small appartment in a city, even though according to official inflation those two are equivalent amounts: it looks a lot like the purchasing power of gold has roughly remained steady whilst the purchasing power of government issued currencies has steadilly fallen and done so faster than official inflation figures for those currencies say it did.
Every investment has grown incredibly in price. Stocks, gold and also housing. That is honestly the biggest reason a blue collar workers pay can no longer feed a family of five easily. In the 60s food was actually pretty expensive back then for example. In the US of 1960 a stick of butter would be the equivalent of $27.74 today. However housing was not and that makes up a huge part of current spending, if you do not own a property already.
That further points towards the idea that it's not Gold going up in price, it's government issued currencies going down in value.
It points to assets being inflated, due to the rich not being taxed properly any longer.
There are in fact more reasons that that.
For example the amount of money in circulation has grown massivelly ever since the 70s, because digitalization means that most money is just numbers in databases and most payments are just bits and bytes rather than actually issued paper currency. In the modern era most money is created by private banks as loans, not issued by central banks (here's a Bank Of England paper on that to show I'm not bullshitting) to the point that over 90% of all money in circulation wasn't issued by a Central Bank.
Then within that context, there's the fall in interest rates which were supposedly temporary reduced by Central Banks after the 2007 Crash to help with the recover but never really went back to the historical average - lower interest rates mean people can take bigger long term loans and still pay the same per-month, which is especially relevant for things like housing because it meant higher house prices that would otherwise be unaffordable were affordable with those lower interest rates. This also affected things like corporate bonds prices - companies could easilly do things like get ultra cheap money buy issuing bonds with very low interest rates or directly from the Money Markets and use that money to buy back their own shares (thus increasing share prices) which large numbers of publicly traded companies did helping push up the Stockmarket.
And then, of course, there's how the concentration of wealth in fewer hands (largelly due "the rich not being taxed properly") meant way more money in the hands of people that don't spend almost any of it in Consumption (because it's way more than what's needed for that) but instead Invest it, so they bid the prices of any and all Investment Assets, including stupid shit that would never otherwise be treated as worthy of investing in (such as Crypto).
It's a big, ultra distorted Economic system, very much purposefully made so to put lots of wealth in a small number of hands (Finance - and hence those who own it - has captured A LOT of wealth way beyond the value they bring to Society) and we're shamelessly lied about all of it.
I mean, on the housing front (in the US at least), it has far more to do with the government backed 30 year mortgage (cheap money drives prices up) and zoning regulations (which constrain supply and also drive prices up).
Are you saying that people possess the same absolute amount on a grown piece?
I thought gold was immune to all this because there was a more less fixed amount
Not how economics works. The price of gold fluxuates wildly because demand for it fluxuates wildly, because people keep gambling on the value of gold.
Oh, so it's a speculative asset with the only special property being that nobody can really inflate it