| Lenin, the implacable Russian revolutionary, despised gold. He thought it should be used to build public lavatories. I was of much the same persuasion early in my career. The yellow metal’s economic utility seemed to me minimal in the light of its declining industrial uses. As an investment it was and remains entirely speculative because it yields no income.
And since the introduction of index-linked government bonds, any merits it might have as an inflation hedge have become less relevant. Certainly gold has been a very erratic store of value in recent decades. Anyone who bought gold at the peak of the gold bull market in the early 1980s saw their investment lose 80 percent of its value in real terms over the next 20 years...............................................Full Article: Source
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