this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

If there is more gold, it’s value should go down. The price should only go up when supply becomes limited, or some new thing demands more than usual.

You're thinking of Gold as a consumer good, I'm thinking of Gold as a currency which is what traditionally gold has been. Even nowadays very little gold is actually consumed (it's used in small quantities for things like wiring inside a microchip package the pads of the dies to the package pins).

When a cross-currency exchange rate changes all that you know for sure is that the relative value of a currency has changed vs that of a different currency - maybe one currency went up in worth, maybe the other currency went down in worth, maybe both at the same time, maybe both went down at different speeds, maybe both went up at different speeds.

It's exactly because "if there is more gold, it’s value should go down" AND gold has being up in quantity by about 1.2% per year due to mining, that I'm saying that the movement of the cross-currency exchange rate of the GLDUSD pair is more easilly explained by the fall in value of the US Dollar rather than by some greater worth of Gold.

It makes sense that the currency that nowadays is mainly created when banks lend money (as explained in the Bank Of England paper "Money Creation in the Modern Economy") would lose value way faster than the currency that's created when more of it is mined and mining only adds around 1.2% to its amount in human hands per year.

I'm actually saying that Gold is going down in value, it's just that the Dollar, Euro and most other paper currencies are going down in value even faster so the cross-currency exchange rates between Gold and those currencies are such that the same amount of Gold can buy more of those currencies.

Gold has a lot of practical use, but because it’s value is hyper inflated it is almost always more cost effective to use a cheaper material.

Well, you see, you got the consequence right but you didn't go back enough enough in analysing the causal chain to get to the root causes - gold price vs the price of inferior alternatives for many of its uses, such as Copper, is at its root what it is because there is way less Gold in the Earth's crust that we can mine than there is Copper as you can see here (note that the vertical scale is logarithmic).

Copper is between 100,000 and a million times more abundant than Gold.

Per your logic Gold should be at least 100,000x more expensive than Copper, not just 10,000x.

In Human History stuff that is rare and doesn't decay tends to become a store of value - at one point even Aluminum was a store of value because it was rare since the process to extract it from Bauxite handn't been invented yet.

This also means that if suddenly some way to mine way more Gold is found (say, asteroid mining), its price will collapse vs things that don't benefit from it, similarly to what happened to Aluminum when the process to get it from Bauxite was invented.

It's the modern government issued currencies whose tokens are not themselves rare materials (the so-called "paper currencies") or a stated guaranteed IOU for a rare material (such the USD was during the Gold standard when the USD was legally tradable for Gold by the US Government at a fixed rate) that are in Historical terms unusual and very recent (less than a century old). For me it makes sense that any weird movements in the exchange rate between Gold and government issued currencies is more likely explained by issues with these "recent" inventions rather than issues with what was a currency for millenia.

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Even with a fixed money supply, prices are still set by a formula that accounts for the velocity of money, or how often any particular unit of money is spent (I spend a dollar at the store, who spends the dollar with a supplier, who spends the dollar by paying a worker, who spends the dollar and so on and so forth). It also accounts for the total economic production.

Peg the whole thing to a semi fixed supply of gold and the prices can still change drastically with shifts in the velocity of money or total aggregate production. That's why fiat currency is good, so that the central bank can pull on different levers to try to keep prices stable, even as different things are happening.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Two points:

  • We don't have a fixed money supply in the modern system when banks can issue debt. Not even close. I suggest you read the Bank Of England's paper called "Money Making in the Modern Economy" which I mentioned.
  • We're talking about different things here. I'm not suggesting Gold as a trade token, I'm not even suggesting Gold as a store of value for stable times, I'm suggesting gold as a store of value against things like large economic crashes (the upcoming AI bubble crash, possibly with a Realestate bubble crash) and those times when the dominant Imperial Power in the World is being replaced by a now one (such as it seems to be the case new ones, as now with the US decaying and China rising). I'm suggesting that, purely because Gold has way less exposure to Politics and human mismanagement in general than even major currencies.

I think I failed so far at explaining myself mainly by talking too much.

My point is simple: gold and fiat currencies are roughly the same, but gold isn't issued by anybody and isn't managed by anybody whilst fiat currencies are, so gold is less exposed to the risks inherent to greed and corruption of those who issue and manage currencies - there's not temptation to "issue more gold" because it's not at all possible, there is nobody deciding "gold interest rates" because there is no such thing (to have interest you need to have more money tomorrow than you have today, as today's loan will be repaid tomorrow plus interest and you can't really make more gold any faster than mining it)

Gold has less exposure to Politicians and Central Banks - that's it, that's the important difference.

In stable times when living in mature Economies, that difference is pretty much irrelevant, in times like now it can make a huge difference which is probably why the GLDUSD exchange rate took of with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and accelerated even more with Trump's second mandate as POTUS.

[–] exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We don't have a fixed money supply in the modern system when banks can issue debt. Not even close. I suggest you read the Bank Of England's paper called "Money Making in the Modern Economy" which I mentioned.

Yes, I'm quite familiar with that paper.

I'm not arguing that we have a fixed money supply. I was saying that if we were on a gold standard, in an alternative universe hypothetical, where the money supply was close to fixed, we would probably see worse price volatility.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh, yeah, Gold seems to fail miserably as a trade token in a growing economy.

However I'm not making the case that Gold should replace fiat currencies, I'm making the case that Gold is a good long term store of value in times of large political risks such as the ones we seem to be going through in the West right now (most notably in the US, though the explosion in wealth inequality and growth in the Far-Right is far from only there) as well as during economic crashes with global impact (such as what's likely to happen when the AI bubble blows), whilst even the currencies of major stable countries are much less so.

There's not going to be a "Brexit" impacting Gold as Brexit impacted the GBP or an end of the dominance period of the nation issuing Gold as there is sure to be for the USD.

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