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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

The events of the last year certainly have a role to play, but the overall effect is just the result of trendlines that have been in play for quite a while.

Here's a world gold council (i know...) review/survey of central banks gold holdings from mid 2025 (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/central-bank-gold-rese...). It notes that gold purchases (by mass) have been elevated going back to ~2023.

Gold prices have also been on an upward trajectory ever since 2023 (https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html)

Whatever is happening now is bigger than actions over the last year.

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I think the initial catalyst for this was when the US/Biden arbitrarily removed Russia from SWIFT post Ukraine invasion. Whether people agreed or disagreed with that decision isn't really material to the discussion, the fact remained that the west decided to remove Russia and they basically had no recourse. And given the, well, unpredictable nature of the current US executive I think it's kinda kicked other countries into overdrive.

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.

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

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.

Fiat is a shit investment that loses even with interest but it isn't really volatile.

> its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat

You're defining gold to be stable, and fiat to be volatile. Well, fiat is volatile, but that doesn't make gold stable.

Gold (measured in dollars) nearly doubled over the last year. Does that mean that the dollar is worth only half what it was a year ago? No, it doesn't. (There's been some inflation, but not nearly 100%.)

Gold is down 10% since January 28th. Does that mean that the dollar is worth 10% more than it was on January 28th? No, it doesn't.

Gold is not as stable as you claim it is.

The only "stability" gold has is an emergent property of an interconnected system of hairless apes somehow making each other believe they need it. Same with fiat, bitcoin, or whatever we come up with tomorrow. None of these things have any real utility outside of an expectation that the peer ape also finds them valuable.

I find this to be quite an interesting perspective change!

If I may try for a metaphor, then it's like our default perspective from the Earth is that we are the center of the universe, the other planets, Sun, and stars move around us, and we are stationary.

But, to zoom out, you can take a more objective view that everything is moving independently (ie, volatile). The baseline stability is a subjective perspective.

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.

>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.

Those are only relevant on a shorter timescale; on a long timescale gold's held its value extremely well. The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

So you’d be far worse off if you had put your savings in gold than in fiat currency based investments

Barely keeping up with inflation is not the win you think it is.

For certain periods of time, not losing to inflation is a major win. The more people think that we're headed into such a period, the more they reach for gold.

That comparison actually sounds horrible for gold... By all accounts we should be extremely more efficient in manufacturing loafs of bread. So a same amount of gold should buy lot more bread now than 2000 years ago.

So if you really think about it. If you held gold for 2000 years. You would only reach same standard of living as 2000 years ago...

All value is subjective and thus at the whims of wild animal spirits.

Gold seems stable largely because the price must rise to make mining significantly more of it economically viable. Yet, were it truly stable, prices measured in terms of gold should have seen price deflation from the Roman era to now. That this is not the case proves that gold has zero intrinsic value. It may have some inherent utility, but that is not the same thing. As people want more gold for use as a conductor, or in alloys for dental prostheses, or for adornment the price will go up. Speculative demand can make the price go up. Demand for trade without USD can make the price go up.

Gold and USD prices are independent of one another. That they can be used to measure one another is also a human invention and an accident of history.

All value is subjective.

> The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

That seems pretty unlikely, when the price of a loaf of bread in gold now is less than half of what it was only 3 years ago.

You've picked a shorter timescale.

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