Gold really fascinates, and divides, investing/commentariat/Bitcoin communities.

Its recent ATH draws all the eyes to it; the physical fervor/backlog-at-the-BoE (#889502, #896492) making that even more newsworthy.

Here's Mr. Guthrie in the FT, a magazine already on Trump tilt (#890832), explaining how actually it's Trump's chaotic derangements that have propelled gold upwards

Lurking in the background, is a suspicion that the world could descend into chaos. ... [Gold] has recently shown that it can rise in anticipation of destructive events, counterbalancing any portfolio losses on equities.

Gold fans think the metal is worth holding because humans have treasured it for millennia. They often distrust money created by central and commercial banks. They sometimes characterise gold as “a hedge against inflation,” though this is disputable.

This Lindy effect of humans treasuring gold for millennia sounds really cool but never really resonated much with me. Yes, and? Human behavior in, say, Mesopotamia doesn't seem to carry any direct lineage/meaning to today — certainly not when that history, via thousands of years of monetary meh and a classical gold standard separated by a century of fiat, is so far off.

We're in a digital, financialized world now. Who cares?We're in a digital, financialized world now. Who cares?

Trump craziness has not yet turned me into a gold bug. But I have become gold curious. Low-probability events, including a US debt crisis and attempts to overthrow US democracy, have moved up the long tail of risks. The relative political and economic stability that stretched from the mid-nineties to the late noughties now seems like a historic blip. Many central banks ran down their gold reserves then.

Central bankers have gone back to seeing gold as a reserve asset that supports economic confidence during crises. That helps explain a 90 per cent price rise since the Covid outbreak started in earnest. Gold is also harder for enemies to expropriate than foreign currency reserves deposited or traded overseas.

That last bit is cool, but comes with its counterpart of difficulty in using, which Russia learned to its detriment a few years ago: nobody can seize or freeze it, but you're having a hard time using it (what, you gonna ship gold bars to China or the Middle East? Or financialize it, but who's gonna repo it for you?)

While gold investments don't have any good avenues (ranging from custodial ETFs to custodial bullion to custodial shares in gold miners), peeps are taking self-custody:

You could alternatively go the whole hog and pay a premium for coins or ingots to own directly. Surprising numbers of retail investors do. Their purchases accounted for a quarter of total demand of 4,553 tonnes last year reported by the WGC, ahead of central banks. You would then have to store your loot without attracting the attention of thieves.

non-paywalled: https://archive.md/t7hxq