The price of gold is not immediately responsive to goods inflation, it can be lagging or leading and the correlation can also fluctuate. Long term it's been good at tracking money supply but short term it doesn't necessarily give you a timely signal.

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wqaatwt 5 days ago | parent [-]

Lagging by 10-20 years like between 1980 - 2002 when it declined even in nominal terms despite consumer prices more than doubling?

If you bought in 1980 you would have had to wait until 2024 to break even when adjusted by CPI…

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dchftcs 5 days ago | parent [-]

Over a time frame of multiple decades, it's been volatile but overall kept pace with money supply. Timing is always tricky, even with SP500 which has given higher return.

Maybe "good at" was stretching it, but there are things that lagged forever, such as a retail savings account and Japanese government bonds. It's tracked CPI better than silver.

	▲	wqaatwt 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Due to obvious reason only the period after Bretton Woods counts. So 55 years. 1980 and 2001 was almost half of that and the real price of gold declined by 4-5x. If you take out the spike in the late it’s still almost 2x or so compared to the 70s (very volatile period). This wasn’t lag. M2 supply grew continuously and increased by >3x during he two decades while even the nominal price of gold declined. After the gold standard was abandoned it became a highly speculative volatile asset.