It's not very convincing, though: there's a huge runup in gold prices (as is often the case) between 2023 and the present, and a long do-nothing period before that (also often the case). The major consumers of gold are about: 50% jewelry, 10% industrial, 20% central banks, a large run-up from about 10% in the 2010s.

I like to think about the inherent contradictions of goldbugs going long on central bank portfolio policy: they both tend to distrust the central bank but in a way the central bank activities partially endorse their habits, and are the source of recent appreciation and thus accusations of "hidden" inflation. But central banks operate in an anarchic world system where they need something even independent of reserves held in other sovereign currencies, I presume most gold bugs are holding ETFs in an existing financial system (which is non-orthogonal: if you assume a financial system, why not avail yourself of the superior alternatives?) or have it in a safe in their house which has some other obvious problems.

I hold no gold, if I want hydraulic and non-volatile inflation compensation, it's quite simple: short-dated sovereign debt, aka the humble money market fund, which can be seen as the lower-fee version of the checking account. Nobody likes being a sucker, holding debt for below the time value of money, including changes in nominal value. It has immense price discovery pressure, and it finds its level nicely. If I were to hold gold, I would need some viable theory about how much I should hold to be de-correlated from other assets to be worthwhile. Maybe if I was exposed to jewelry costs and wanted to hedge them.

See https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/markets-and-economy/market..., https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/other-publications/ire/focus...

As a "measurement of value" they both suck. Gold is (extremely) volatile and currency inflates.

Well, you can't do much to correct for the speculation noise in gold. But maybe we can attack from the other side. Maybe we could record prices for various representative products in a giant data set somewhere and calculate and record, I dunno, a "price index" that normalizes the prices to a value that is stable over time.

I bet people would pay good money to look at a chart like that. Maybe we could find one.

Storing that gold most cost something too.

you're joking, but this is basically what it means to be retired...

I'd definitely be curious to see the S&P valued in different commodities over time. With that said, gold certainly feels like a special indicator given its history as a universally recognized store of value.

Not really. Gold is not a random commodity. It is historically the primary compact store of value, only recently to meet competition with Bitcoin.