Maverick: You seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of the same fetish miko has. 
Actually, I have a fetish for books. A lot of usefull stuff can be found there among the piles of crap, of course.
Since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 the dollar lost 95% of it's purchasing power instead of increasing it four times as the previous trend caused by increase in productivity (meaning decrease of cost of goods) would warrant.
If one owned gold since 1913 (or since any earlier time), he would have preserved one's purchasing power about the same. That is of course if one hid it from unsconstitutional confiscation in 1934 and kept it illegally untill ban on owning it was repealed in 1975.
The same merchandise, say a good suit of clothes, cost the same ounce of gold all the way since the days of ancient Rome.
I'd say that people valuing dull pieces of paper backed by nothing the value of which is constantly dropping and controlled by a bunch of ignorants* have some kind of unhealthy fetish. (* Just recently Treasury Secretary John Snow in a bout of double idiocy accused China of artificially keeping its currency value too low and thus hurting us by providing us with goods that are too cheap. I guess when he shops in the store he insists on paying more rather than less... But that is only the first and minor idiocy. Even a brain-dead keynsian knows that when the country's currency is
undervalued, it will have a
positive trade balance. Of course everyone literate knows that China's trade balance with the world is
negative! They buy more than they sell. They do have positive trade balance with US - like the world in general has had for many years - which means that it is dollar that is overvalued.)
How about that $600 bil. budget deficit for the forceeable future? Selling that much worth of new treasury bonds would raise interest rates and even if we did not have Gov. Bernanke promise, we would know that the Fed would never allow the raise in interest rates, especially in an election year. Don't we promote economy growth with increased low interest rates? So where does one get $600 billion without raising taxes, selling bonds or selling gold? Printing them, of course. Does anyone think the value of their existing dollars would stay the same with $600 billion of their newly-issued brothers dumped into circulation? With asian foreign-currency reserves stuffed so full of dollars already they have no vault space left?
Of course that much inflation in an attempt to keep interests low is bound to cause a raise in intermediate- and long-term interest rates, popping the housing bubble among other negative side-effects.
By the way, Mav, why did Franklin D. Roosevelt needed that gold so much as to confiscate it and outlaw it's posession by US citizens? Is there is a substance less harmfull to own than gold - an inert metal with no dangerous physical, chemical or biological properties?
You are a pathetic self-deluded serf, Maveric. You (or at least your parents' generation) were robbed of your posessions by your own government and you would rather pretend that you did not need what was stolen from you than face the ugly truth.
Oh, yeah - I forgot to add hypocritic. You and the rest of americans pay the same price for gold in your wife's jewelry as I would pay for it but somehow it's me who has a gold fetish.
An ounce of gold is worth about $380 now - basically recovered from a temporary artificial drop caused by massive governments' sale/lease of gold reserves in 1990s. Anyone does not believe that the price of gold will not be higher than now in 5, 10 or 15 years? In fact, I will be more specific:
During the next 10-15 years the price of gold in dollars and the value of Dow Jones Industrial Index will meet at the same number. miko
