Most of that is some digital system saying you are owed gold without independent audit of actual bullion reserves. More worrying: many central banks are buying actual physical gold and absorbing the extra price for moving it and custody. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/28/bullion-bon...
That is insane. What happens when that house of cards comes falling down?
Gold hits all time high
101–110 of 140 posts
Re: Gold hits all time high
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's wildly misunderstanding things. The fed doesn't trade, regulate, hold or sell gold. That price you're quoting is for a historical artifact called a Gold Certificate. These things have a value set by law (not by the fed) of 42 and 2/9th dollars. They don't sell them anymore, but if you happen to have one they're required to buy it from you (IIRC) at that rate. As always, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
It's a little bit broader than this. In the Fed there is the so called "statutory price for gold" and it's not limited to gold certificates. Any gold in the Fed would be priced at $42 by law. The fact that they don't technically own any gold and work around the issue only makes it so much more amusing. It only serves to tell people they can fix prices and make outrageous course-correction changes overnight and people…
Real world economic policy works by virtue of steady hands and rigorously applied norms, not goofball trickery around edge cases of ancient laws.
[1] The idea that the Treasury's statutory authority to mint coinage could be exploited to mint a single illiquid-by-virtue-of-size asset that could then be borrowed against without increasing the debt ceiling.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#103What is it about gold, anyways? None of its useful properties were known until recently (and mostly overhyped and upsold tbh, at least as far as those stupid cables go). Are we really just instinctively attracted to shiny metals? Or do people like it as a status symbol? (not to act like im above it all, i still have my gold-plated pokemon jigglypuff trading card from burger king in 1999 and i often use golden paint o…
Basically, the chemical composition of the earth's crust isn't going to change any time soon. That means that the supply of gold is going to increase only slowly. In contrast, Trump has been making noises about wanting to replace Powell as chair of the Fed, because Powell won't dance to Trump's tune. I do not want a world where Trump can determine (even if indirectly) the value of the dollar, or the interest rate, or…
All the Germans who had great gold reserves in 1930 still ended up fighting in WW2. Hell, many of them were Jewish and had that gold stolen and sent to the Swiss for safekeeping by the Nazi state. The danger to their society was not hyperinflation, it was a hostile government sending them to die for stupid reasons, and literally like a hundred people, or fewer, choosing out of utter stupidity and an insane ideology based purely on ignorance, forcing everyone into a bad situation.
There is no safety, of any kind, under authoritarianism. Gold will not save you.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#104The price of gold fluctuated significantly in 1979 due to concerns over whether inflation could be brought under control. It started the year at ~$250.00 per ounce and ended the year at ~$850.00 per ounce. It was a presidential election year and consumers were getting squeezed hard by rising energy prices. Russia invaded Afghanistan, Carter suspended participation in the Olympics, and there was a general feeling of c…
Re: Gold hits all time high
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fiat money is not going down as much as asset prices are going up, though. How do you measure this? What is this claim founded in? You could indeed say that inflation should be defined by the asset prices. This would couple fiat and asset prices definatorically.
Because normal people mainly use money to pay rent and utilities and taxes and buy corn from the grocery store, not to buy future cash flows.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#106Gold, silver, stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, baseball cards, fine art, Rolexes - everything is trading at or near their all time highs. The value of the US dollar is simply going down.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#107Gold, silver, stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, baseball cards, fine art, Rolexes - everything is trading at or near their all time highs. The value of the US dollar is simply going down.
The art market doesn't seem to be doing well at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45175628
* https://watchcharts.ca/watches/price_index
* https://watchcharts.ca/watches/brand_index/rolex
* https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/used-watch-market-prices-e...
>> The value of the US dollar is simply going down.
I wonder what could be causing nervousness in the USD regime…
Re: Gold hits all time high
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've also had four big rounds of Quantitative Easing from the Fed since the financial crisis, with the most recent coming right after the pandemic. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
This really feels like the original sin to me (I am not remotely an economist). Perhaps it can just be fixed with taxes to take money out of circulation.
Easier said than done, I think.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fiat money is not going down as much as asset prices are going up, though. So it's part of the story, money losing value in the real economy. That's been happening since moving off the gold standard at roughly similar rates. There's something that happened during ZIRP & Negative Real Interest Rate Policies that completely divorced the value of money in the real economy from the value of assets & future cash flows, an…
> Fiat money is not going down as much as asset prices are going up, though. How do you measure this? What is this claim founded in? You could indeed say that inflation should be defined by the asset prices. This would couple fiat and asset prices definatorically.
Re: Gold hits all time high
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little bit broader than this. In the Fed there is the so called "statutory price for gold" and it's not limited to gold certificates. Any gold in the Fed would be priced at $42 by law. The fact that they don't technically own any gold and work around the issue only makes it so much more amusing. It only serves to tell people they can fix prices and make outrageous course-correction changes overnight and people…
Again, that's all just conspiracy nonsense. Yes, there are old laws. No, they don't effect macroeconomic policy and to claim they do is silly. This is of a piece with the Trillion Dollar Coin nonsense[1] being hawked in equally silly circles on the other side of the aisle. Real world economic policy works by virtue of steady hands and rigorously applied norms, not goofball trickery around edge cases of ancient laws.…
The fact they they kept the price fixed should serve as a reminder they can do this at any time. There is no conspiracy theory, they've literally done this and nobody challenged them and no laws have changed since then (thus the "ancient law" that is somehow still in effect). The sophisticated economists that study "real world economic policy works by virtue of steady hands and rigorously applied norms" can make another "ancient law" any time they want.