Why Gold?

Boston Fed: Boom-Bust Housing Market Unsustainable

Gold last traded at $1,762 an ounce. Silver at $25.77 an ounce.

NEWS SUMMARY: Precious metal prices eased back Tuesday as rising home prices and consumer confidence boosted the dollar. U.S. stocks rose as bank stocks and other cyclical plays tied to the economic recovery climbed.

ero Hedge--"At a time when many investors are calling gold 'a relic,' and many younger ones, in particular, are buying Bitcoin instead, it is worth going back to fundamentals and looking at gold's role as money over thousands of years. I am not here to attack Bitcoin. Rather, I am here to defend gold.

Gold has an advantage that Bitcoin does not have, that Bitcoin inherently cannot have, which is its age. Gold has survived and performed its job for literally thousands of years. We shall have to wait a little longer to say that Bitcoin is as good as gold.

Nearly two-and-a-half millennia ago, Aristotle wrote his famous treatise on money. Money serves as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. In his treatise, Aristotle listed the characteristics of ideal money.

Money should be divisible, which is why we do not use fine art as money. It should be fungible, which is why we do not use real estate as money. It should be rare, which is why we do not use iron ore as money, and so on. Aristotle concluded that only gold has all these attributes and is the ideal form of money....

Gold has maintained its purchasing power during periods of high inflation and sharp deflation when the stock market or the currency collapses. Even during periods of chaos or war, gold holds its value. During these periods, people will look for alternate places for their cash....

Ideal money, according to Aristotle, must be a thing of value in and of itself. Gold is universally recognized and valued. You can travel to Zurich or Dubai or the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Everyone will immediately recognize gold and desire it. Why, you can give some to your wife to adorn her neck. Here, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies spectacularly fail. Blockchain is a valuable invention...Satoshi Nakamoto has a brilliant mind...but ultimately, there is nothing of intrinsic worth there.

Former BCA Research and Brandywine analyst Chen Zhao writes that 'crypto was created out of thin air and will disappear like mist.' One does not have to go that far, but one can be certain that the same words could not be written about gold."