One more thing on this. An ounce of gold doesn't change value. An ounce of gold is a physical thing you can hold in your hand. It is what it is. What changes value is paper money. The more money in circulation, the more it takes to buy that same ounce of gold. The gold itself hasn't changed at all.

In fact, when you look at the "prices" of things, priced in ounces of silver or ounces of gold, they are incredibly constant over time. Gasoline, for example, has traded for about 1/4 ounce of silver per gallon, which was about 25 cents from the early 1900's to about 1965. That same pre-1965 quarter, which contains 90% silver, is worth about $4.85 in today's money. In other words, gas is cheap today when priced in silver, which is consistent with lower energy costs during recessions/depressions.

We are all trained since we were kids to think of dollars as an immutable thing and the value of other things changing. But that's not at all what's happening. You need to see the physical thing, the ounce of gold or ounce of silver or gallon of diesel fuel, or whatever as the constant. It's the dollars that change.

So, that means that gold is not really an "investment" like a business is. The gold will always be exactly what it is. It will always be an ounce of gold. It's not going to multiply. It becomes "worth" more only in the sense that the dollars are becoming worth less, and it takes more of them to buy the gold. Gold is a very convenient *store* of value, but not exactly an investment.

I strongly encourage you to read Murray Rothbard's "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" which is available for free from mises.org.

In times of dramatic money printing (such as today, although the money is created electronically rather than "printed"), we should seek to protect our savings from eventual loss by inflation. One way to do this is to buy STUFF instead of holding currency. It doesn't matter what that STUFF is, but some things are better than others. Convenient STUFF that holds its value over time has certain properties:

1. It doesn't spoil, or decompose over time.
2. It will be valuable to people in the future.
3. It doesn't take a huge amount of space to store.
4. It is easily verifiable as genuine.
5. It is easily divisible into smaller quantities.

Precious metals have all of these properties, which is why free markets have gravitated to them as "money" over the millennia. Other STUFF has been used as money. In America today, people are already using ammunition as a barter currency because it is so scarce at the moment.

The whole point is that if your currency is losing value due to printing, then having your savings in that currency costs you value over time. In an extreme case of hyperinflation, it could cause you to lose all of it's value. But a truck, a gallon of diesel, a bag of rice, a rifle, or an ounce of gold, are a physical THINGS that are not subject to the whims of monetary planners (excepting situations like government seizure like the 1933 seizing of citizen-owned gold in the United States). That makes them good repositories of savings in uncertain times.