Hi mindmeld,
welcome to the thread!
Well I agree mostly. Am holding a bit of gold as well as silver, but I'm not too sure about that in the longer term... Have been reading Piketty's books and looking on some of his (and others) research. Some of the stats are fascinating: For example, the gold price was almost exactly the same between 1700 and 1914 (around 19 bucks). (http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/xls/RawDataFiles/GoldPrices17922012.pdf) Then WWI broke out, everyone started printed money, fiat currencies, etc. etc. etc. And look what crazy stuff it started doing then! (https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart)
Can't help but feeling it has quite a "long way down" as they say, should something drastic happen in the economy. Seems that no one really knows the characteristics of gold either: is it an "inflation hedge", or a "deflation bet"? Seems to me that what you want to hold in inflations, is assets. Especially stocks. In deflation, cash in one form or another. (Does gold work as "cash" does? Well, if the fiats should really crash, it should become the only form of trusted money. Possibly crypto, but that feels too new to be truly trusted in a crisis, in the same way that gold seems too old (can't really see us all trading with gold coins again...)) Deflation start to seem more and more likely – even, in the long term, unavoidable – to me, and then gold is probably good. Will definitely hold at least 5 % precious metals for now anyways. 10 % seems about right to me. |
