Gold has always been stable, because it is physically limited.

It is the fiat currency debasement via unlimited money printing that makes the gold chart go up.

Imagine being in Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany and watching your stock portfolio and gold going up...

> Gold has always been stable, because it is physically limited.

Incorrect. Physical scarcity matters, but it’s not the main driver. Gold’s price is far more sensitive to interest rates, dollar strength, sentiment and fear, speculative flows.

The stability it’s historically shown was mostly the result of fixed monetary systems, and those are long gone.

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coliveira 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The real price of gold has been deflated by paper gold/futures trading, which has the effect of multiplying the perceived amount of gold in circulation without a necessary counterpart in physical gold. Financial institutions can within limits manipulate the price of gold so that it remains lower than it should be if the physical material had to be delivered.

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bijowo1676 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat which is being printed every day depending on the factors you mentioned (interest rates, expectations of future growth, sentiment etc).

because you are getting paycheck in fiat, you are psychologically programmed to think of fiat as something stable, and Gold as volatile.

while in reality prices expressed in Gold ounces remained fairly stable for example: https://i.redd.it/1b5mfrqkxxef1.jpeg

	▲	thaumasiotes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're wrong; the prices of precious metals have never been stable, which is why bimetallic systems have always had a lot of problems papering over the notionally fixed exchange rate between coins of different metals. That said, I agree that e.g. gold under a regime where most things for sale are priced in gold is more stable than gold as a novelty investment under a fiat currency regime. When things are priced in gold, most of the demand for gold comes from the fact that it's useful as currency. All of the phenomena we have now still exist, and they disturb the price, but they're small effects compared to the demand for currency. In the fiat regime, that source of demand is gone. All of the same random effects still push the price of gold around, but because the price is so much lower (due to much lower demand), the price swings are wilder.