In physical metals that don’t generate income or induce further economic activity, I don’t believe so. What good does a hunk of gold sitting in a safe do for the economy?
Because we need a low risk system to track whether people are net-contributing or -draining society's resources, otherwise it isn't easy to tell who is creating more wealth so they can be supported. Gold remains the best option after centuries (if not millennia) of experimentation.
You want investment in housing. You don’t want slumlords ramping up prices for slums. Presumably somewhere has got the balance correct. I haven’t been to that place.
Gold is not an investment. It takes otherwise productive capital out of the economy and produces nothing. It's functionally no different than stuffing your money in a mattress.
It has utility though: unlike the dollars in your mattress, it can't be printed into oblivion by your central bank. It is relatively portable, and people have flocked to it as a store of value especially during periods of socioeconomic instability when assets are going down and gov't spending is going up. It's tradeable for fiat in any country, so it allows you to bring value along if you relocate.
Its price reflects that utility and like any modern asset, a lot of speculation. You can speculate on whether it's more or less useful given current events -- nothing wrong with speculating that it is only going to be increasingly useful.
Agree it doesn't generate wealth. It's explicitly a store of wealth.
Investment is a weird term because most people would consider keeping cash or cash equivalents (gold) to be investments, even if they don't generate wealth. Cash is also an opinion, in terms of the market.
What is it that you're arguing for then? That there be some entity that gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of all of our excess money? Who gets to decide what's excess? Who gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of the money?
How is this any different than buying a house? Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.
The person you bought it from can do something else with that money, sure, but that's also true of the other person in your transaction to buy gold.
Maybe you'll say a house has more utility than bars of gold, but all of this at the end of the day, seems to come down to your specific views and judgements of what it means for capital to be used productively. So to circle back to the beginning, what is it you're advocating for here? That because you don't see gold as a low risk hedge against inflation as being "productive" it should face more taxes to incentivize it not happening?
> Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.
I mostly agree with you, but I don't think the house comparison is good. Houses require lots of maintenance, and to hold their value (comparable to other houses) they often need remodeling every decade or so. If instead of houses we just said "land" then I think the comparison would hold up more.
You are forgetting the opportunity cost. The gold does not generate wealth it just stores value, like a mattress stuffed with bills. It has become a dead, stagnant, and unproductive thing and by doing that it has removed value from the overall economy that was previously there.
In this case 1/2 of the trade is a dead end. In another hypothetical transaction we might see that the money was instead used to pay for services, and that profit was then spent on food, and then it was spent on fertilizer, and then it was spent on chemicals, and then it was spent on mining, and then it was spent on energy, and then it was invested in.... You get the idea. You can follow a single dollar around the world for years. The money is exchanged, and then exchanged again and again generating profits and adding value to the economy with every exchange.
With the purchase of gold that half of the transaction is instead just... dead. The money is no longer in the economy, it's locked in some dudes junk drawer or a safe instead. Worse, it's not being used to generate excess returns like all of the items above are.
Gold is just... useless. Except of course as a store of value, but even then it's only good if you think the dollars value will decrease and don't care that it's not great for the world around you to extract money from the economy and render it effectively dead.
So before, person A has the dead thing, and after, person B has the dead thing. The result for the economy is exactly the same as if the transaction didn't occur, except the people have switched places.
In economics this is often referred to as a "sterile asset". Buffet called it an "unprodcutive asset". The terms "Zero Coupon" or "Non Yielding Asset" might also apply. You should be able to google any of them to learn more about why they're not good for the economy or for the 'investor'.
The TLDR being that the money exchanged for that useless rock is now wasted. It could have been used to provide genuine economic value, instead it was used to participate in another silly, wasteful, "greater fool" game.
