Comments on: For gold bugs

By: PC

PC — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:44:06 +0000

Does gold have any value to a man on his last legs, stranded in the middle of a desert without water?

That gold has no intrinsic value doesn’t mean that the majority of people don’t value it in some subjective way, nor does it weaken the case for it as a medium of exchange.

By: dearieme

dearieme — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:16:52 +0000

“it has no intrinsic value”: wot, unlike bits of paper?

By: Serf

Serf — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:04:08 +0000

Anyone who thinks gold has no intrinsic value has never bought jewelry for their other half.

By: AntiCitizenOne

AntiCitizenOne — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:36:24 +0000

The problem with gold standards is that money actually represents the time exchanged in the economy, and has little to do with yellow metal.

In a deflationary scenario gold is “over-abundant”, and just doesn’t go away, it causes more problems even though it’s a hard to beat inflation beater (unless your government robs all the aztec gold etc.).

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:21:12 +0000

160,000t is not the store of gold in vaults, its all the gold ever mined. A fair amount (10,000t or so?) has been lost, another huge amount is in jewellery of various forms, electronics, and other industry. Most of this is, with some additional cost and time, recoverable.

By: PC

PC — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:13:24 +0000

I’m a gold bug, in so far as I believe that gold would form the basis of any sound market based currency. And I also agree with him.

Nothing could possibly have ‘intrinsic’ value, given that “value” is such a subjective thing. The reason gold has been used as a medium of exchange for so long (and I would anticipate it would continue to do so) is because of it’s scarcity, physical properties etc that enough people attribute subjective value to.