Gold. It is worth so much and yet so little. No, not a Gold Card...
See, the world sees Gold as being the most valuable currency and there are all these stores going "Sell your jewelry for Gold!" However, is Gold really worth as much as people say it is? It is even used as the most valuable form of money in games...
Think about it this way. What can you make from Gold? You can make jewelry, yes, but it is brittle and will break easily. You can't make wire with it as there are more effective ways to make wire than with gold and much cheaper. You can't use it for survival. You can't make tools with it. You can't make much more than pieces of the human body or computer parts. However, that requires modern technology and in an emergency it is unlikely that Gold computer parts will do you any good. Heck, you might as well just use the computer itself and it would be more effective for anything the parts can be used for. Wonka's rendition of a Golden Ticket, used in Movies. Not real life.
Never in real life would you ever use real Gold to make anything. You can't use it to make tickets, or cards, or anything even the tiniest bit useful in an emergency without the use of technology. Even then, Gold is rarely used. An Artist's Rendition of An Alchemist.
Alchemists tried their hardest to find ways to make Gold for centuries and their efforts made both the history books and the fiction books. Yet for what possible reason would they be doing this? GOLD IS WORTHLESS. So, I leave it to you, TLers, to tell me why Gold is so valuable to everyone if you can't do anything with it?
If you had to kill either a parent or that one guy at the supermarket, who do you choose? People assign their own value to whatever, it's all relative/subjective etc etc
At some point we decided gold is fucking cool, so we pay a lot for it.
I believe it is valuable because it is scarce and doesn't deteriorate, I read somewhere the the total amout of gold mined ever is a very small amount of actual space.
well in India there is a huge demand for gold from the growing middle class, due to its cultural/religious significance. So even though gold has very few practical functions in a the modern world, it's definitely not worthless in the global economy.
also nobody cares about dominion gold anymore, it's all about the plats
I think if you're doing the whole Cracked thing (or wherever it originated) or inserting random pictures in they have to be at least relevant to what you're writing. The way it's set up now they're way too huge and distracting, and the captions are also not really relevant (or funny).
My favorite is when people say to shift assets to gold in times of uncertainty because gold is 'safer' than money, as if the belief gold is valuable is less mutable than the belief money is valuable. Gold is just as likely to do poorly as anything else. There's a lot of sheer hucksterism around the value of gold, people will show you a chart with the value of gold moving up over decades (which is in itself a meaningless indicator of it's future value), if you moved the graph back another few years you'd see all that growth is just recovery from a decline!
It is always slightly funny when people bash fiat currencies, which have value because people accept it has value, then propose using gold which only has value because people accept it has value. More of an anti-government than pro-gold argument.
Buying gold is kinda like betting on the possibility the world falls apart. In that situation I'd rather have canned food any gasoline at any rate.
For those that don't know, in the real-world, gold is used as a reserve currency. This is because the amount of gold is limited and will not change, but the value of money will inflate if governments decide to print them. For example, if the USA decide to reduce their debt by printing money, the value of gold will rise - and those holding them as a reserve currency will be protected against this inflation.
However, for my own 2-cents, I think it's somewhat ridiculous that people dig up the earth for a relatively useless metal just to store them in bank vaults as a reserve currency.
Gold is only valuable because it is scarce. Demand is high precisely because supply is low. People want things that others cannot afford as a way of placing themselves above them on some sort of social stratification. This appeal as a luxury good is what gave it a high, predictable value, which helped lead to its adoption as a standard for currency, which further institutionalized it as something of inherent value. You need only look to auctions of original artwork or things that are signed by famous people to realize that use value is often irrelevant; exclusivity matters.
Also it's shiny.
On December 18 2011 16:07 Romantic wrote: It is always slightly funny when people bash fiat currencies, which have value because people accept it has value, then propose using gold which only has value because people accept it has value. More of an anti-government than pro-gold argument.
Yeah, that's a terrible argument.
A reasonable argument, however, is that such a system makes it far more difficult for a country to undertake expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, which many small government advocates criticize because they tend to cause inflation.
On December 18 2011 14:58 UniversalSnip wrote: My favorite is when people say to shift assets to gold in times of uncertainty because gold is 'safer' than money, as if the belief gold is valuable is less mutable than the belief money is valuable. Gold is just as likely to do poorly as anything else. There's a lot of sheer hucksterism around the value of gold, people will show you a chart with the value of gold moving up over decades (which is in itself a meaningless indicator of it's future value), if you moved the graph back another few years you'd see all that growth is just recovery from a decline!
Saying gold is 'safer' than money is definitely a misnomer, but people are correct to shift assets towards gold. When the value of currency becomes uncertain (or if people expect high inflation) people will shift their assets from cash into other things, since cash will not have as high of a value. Gold just happens to be one of them (others being things like bonds, money market funds, etc). So of course in recent years the price of gold has skyrocketed because people are shifting their assets into things besides currency (demand increases so the price rises).
Why gold? Simply put, gold is one of the most liquid assets (liquid means it's easy to sell. Gold and stocks are liquid, a race horse or a house is illiquid). The semi-financial crisis in recent years showed us that government bonds and money market funds can dry up, despite these being supremely liquid as well. These bonds and money market funds also bear a credit risk, and the past four years have shown that this risk can be dangerous (for example in Europe the credit quality of government bonds deteriorated very rapidly as rating agencies downgraded bonds). So when your other choices for a liquid asset to put your money in are just as uncertain, gold starts to look like a good safe-haven. That's why in the US you keep seeing those commercials for places that want to buy your scrap gold, etc.
I agree that gold is intrinsically not very valuable.
The answer as to why gold has been historically seen as valuable is that due to its scarcity and durability, it has been chosen as a key medium of exchange for other goods which are more useful, such as tools or food. If we did not have such a medium of exchange to indicate value, we would have to go back to the barter system, which obviously has many shortcomings.
Thus the value of gold is created by mankind's collective agreement to take a step above the barter system. If society were to collapse back to the barter system, say in a post-apocalyptic world, gold would be worthless until society developed enough complexity to wish to use something to denote value again.
On December 18 2011 18:29 targ wrote: I agree that gold is intrinsically not very valuable.
The answer as to why gold has been historically seen as valuable is that due to its scarcity and durability, it has been chosen as a key medium of exchange for other goods which are more useful, such as tools or food. If we did not have such a medium of exchange to indicate value, we would have to go back to the barter system, which obviously has many shortcomings.
Thus the value of gold is created by mankind's collective agreement to take a step above the barter system. If society were to collapse back to the barter system, say in a post-apocalyptic world, gold would be worthless until society developed enough complexity to wish to use something to denote value again.
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.creditcardcounsel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/American-Express-Gold-Card.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.boardgamereviews.net/images/gold.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.icollector.com/images/1202/18549/18549_0144_1_lg.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.dominiondeck.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/cards-landing/cards/alchemist.jpg)
