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What use is gold? If you physically own gold coins - especially in sufficiently small denominations - then I suppose that you could go into a grocery store and buy your provisions ... though if you have a hoard of coins then, come a time when people are desperate, you could be robbed of the lot and get killed in the process. (Well the great majority of people cannot currently afford to buy gold coins, so if they became common currency, then it is simply common sense that some people would use their muscle to relieve holders of their hoards - as in days of old.) If you are currently rich enough to physically own whole ingots, then the same applies - except that you can hardly walk into a grocery store and offer to shave a small piece off in exchange for a kilo of carrots ... that's laughable. All you can do is swap your gold back into some fiat currency ... if you meanwhile have not been robbed and killed. Or you might "own" some kind of certificate that you have a call on some gold in some vault or other, but that piece of paper is no better than fiat currency, because you really have no idea whether or not there is sufficient physical gold to cover your own and all others claims. (Back to the original banking system, in effect, and the original failure of the "gold standard", because all you really own is a piece of paper which "promises" to deliver what probably does not exist.) Gold is running out. South Africa is planning to plunge some four kilometres in order to try to maintain gold production - at increasing cost. Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, was once one of the easiest goldfields on the planet, but is now one of the largest open-cut mines ... able to be seen from the Moon, apparently (shades of the Great Wall of China and maybe symbolically apt, because that Wall failed to keep out the influence of Western civilization, industrialism, financialism and so on) ... hence the importance of China today in the "globalized economy", since China got opened-up by the Opium Wars instigated by the British Empire ... like Japan got opened-up by the US Empire sending gunships back around the 1890s. So there is now blow-back (a CIA concept). The pigeons are coming home to roost. Yep gold is running out, but that's not all. Back to Western Australia. Iron ore deposits are running out too ... but at least you can make tools from iron/steel with which to till the soil and produce food. What use is gold? Oil wells are running dry ... but at least oil provided material abundance for a while and, along with natural gas for making fertilizers, helped to provide burgeoning populations with food. And so it goes with all other useful metals and other resources, one way or another. But what use is gold? Gold-bugs say that gold has been a reliable store of wealth for millenia and say that it is only since fiat currency came off a gold standard that things have gone awry, but if such a principle had merit, then things should not have gone wrong for millenia should they. (Perhaps it is insane to keep doing the same thing over and over again, whilst expecting a different result.) If gold really was some kind of absolute criterion, then ancient emperors should not have been able to adulterate gold coinage ... which was really an early version of the "printing presses" of fiat currencies. Gold itself is "fiat" - like some work of art that gets assigned some arbitrary cash value and so becomes a "store of wealth" for those who can afford millions of dollars for some absurdity for trash done by Warhol or, for that matter, something lovely done by Constable. Gold is at its best when transformed into a work of art, e.g. a piece of jewellery, but what use it it otherwise? You cannot use it to make a tool with which to grow food and it has very few practical uses in general ... yes it is a good conductor of electricity, but not a lot better than more abundant copper and aluminium (which are also running out, as we collectively deplete resources) but, in any case, what use is gold? I'm curious for some gold-bug to explain how gold has some special place and why it has actually failed to be a "store of wealth" for millenia ... why things should be any different now, e.g. like during the end of the Roman Empire, when the coinage got devalued by adulterating it ... by minting ever more of it, with ever-less gold content. Now, it seems to me, we have a double (or more) whammy, because the printing presses are running hot AND manipulation is going on with the fiat (paper/electronic) price of gold ... after all, what more can you do with the stuff, other than to sell it for USDs, Euros and whatever, if you want to buy groceries and Warhol trash? Let some gold-bug explain why gold has some intrinsic value, e.g. over and above what the great majority of humans find useful in daily life, because most of us cannot afford even little trinkets, let alone ingots and even paper shares in mining companies, or else those which claim to sell shares in supposed gold held in store. What use is gold anyway, at the end of the day? What can you actually DO with it? It is actually about the most useless commodity on the planet and it is running out ... no wonder that gold-bugs are bewildered that gold has not hit highs. Oil actually underpins world economies - not gold - and that commodity is in decline, so expect the price of it to increase, rather than the price of a useless metal. The current backing of the USD is oil-based ... since 1971, when the US gave up any pretence of backing the dollar with gold. What use is gold when the current world is all about oil and other resources of finite materials? What use is gold?
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