TJ, why not pick 5 hours, 5 weeks or 5 months? What matters on speculation is nothing more than entry and exit points to the individual. <gold was around before the dollar ever was. got to pick a date, and 5 years seem good, else we pick 50 years, or 500 years, or, to make sure we got events covered, 5000 years. >
To consider value created by various enterprises, one needs to start at their beginning.
So, to start at 5000 years ago for gold, we should consider the value achieved by that gold in the intervening years. It acted as a means of exchange and store of value for all that time, so it has certainly done a very good job.
Add up all the gold ever and see what value has been created. It has served as store of value and means of exchange mostly in this century when most of it was produced and converted to said store of value and means of exchange.
Now add up all the value created by the top dozen tech companies and see what value has been created. Or, more accurately, all the tech companies [gains and losses included] if not all companies. Gold is somewhere around the 5th significant figure I guess.
Gold is an interesting artifact of a barbarous past, which in today's economy is somewhere down in the 10th significant figure. Okay, maybe the 5th. Details are irrelevant. Even oil is trivial in the modern economy. Oil has doubled and doubled again. The global economy yawned and continued with GDP growth at an excellent rate.
Even in a narrow comparison with the USD, which is not a store of value so much as a means of exchange, [though I am foolishly still holding my USD as a store of value which is soon to end as tax audit is over and other ideas loom], the USD is some $10 trillion in value and all the gold in the world is nowhere near that valuable. As a means of exchange compared with the world's currencies, gold is insignificant.
What matters, as with WWII and Taiwan and Japan and Adolf and so on of historical interest is where we go from here. Some things have faded into history. Some are still to be resolved. The USD is one of them. I would be surprised if it still exists in 20 years other than in a stunted has-been form. Gold will be equally irrelevant, with a few naked Aztecs prancing around their bonfire, waving their family jewels, chanting imprecations and incantations about glory days to come.
Mqurice |
