Gold is a barbarous relic of past monetary systems, irrelevant in today’s fast-moving computerized markets.

NOT!: Gold is held as a reserve asset in almost every central bank in the earth. It serves as a last-resort asset which is used for grave international crises such as economic calamity, environmental and weather disasters, war, and the sort. A former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, made these comments about gold and central banking in answer to the barbarous relic claim:

We sometimes forget that central banking as we know it today is, in fact, largely an invention of the past hundred years or so, even though a few central banks can trace their ancestry back to the early nineteenth century or before. It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency toward more inflation, not less. By and large, if the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with “free banking.” The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.

Other central bankers, which includes the current U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, have mentioned similar admiration for this barbarous relic. In lieu of an international gold standard, individual investors have been forced to put themselves on the gold standard, individual investors have been forced to place themselves on the gold standard even in today’s computerized markets. Gold today has the same relevance it has always enjoyed. It is the asset of last resort and has universal value for both individual investors and nation-states.