Great advice if you live in Zimbabwe. But in the USA and other developed economies economic growth always beats inflation over the long term and so "investing" in gold versus investing in stocks and bonds is a major losing proposition. This was true even during the worst years of 70's stagflation.

Gold beats burying your money in the back yard, but not much else. If you're going to subscribe to the various paranoid theories pushed by gold advocates, you might as well invest in stockpiling ammunition and cigarettes.

Are you suggesting that my giant stockpile of ammunition and cigarettes is a waste of time?

How dare you!

I try and stockpile cigarettes but I smoke them faster than I can store them. So that leaves ammo which I don't want and gold.

I certainly hope we don't go the way of Zimbabwe, but let me ask you this:

Do you think that the US currency will be worth less than the interest rates currently provided by safe investments?

Stocks and bonds may outperform Gold in many scenarios but unlike equites/bonds, Gold is a great currency/inflation hedge and it is far less risky. Even blue chip stocks and bonds can lose 100% of their value - that can never happen to Gold.

So there is a good upside and minimal downside for an instrument that provides a good currency/inflation hedge. Tell me another simple investment that meets those criteria and I'll be most grateful.

Savings bonds are a reasonable hedge. The only way you're going to lose your money on those is basically if the economy has a very bad collapse. Like not just 1929 bad, like fall of the Roman Empire bad. If you honestly think that's a realistic possibility, you're going to want bullets and smokes (for example), not a bunch of shiny shit. You think people are going to be buying a lot of jewelry in this situation? Plating a lot of electronics maybe? In the end, just like a currency gold is only valuable because people think it is.

If you're just talking about stocks, in the 20th century there was exactly one time when inflation exceeded the growth for more than a year or two. If you had invested your money in the stock market on October 28th 1929, you would have had to wait until 1950 to get your money back. And from the mid-70's through the mid-80's the market merely kept up with inflation, but you wouldn't have actually lost money vs. inflation. Other than that, there has been no situation in which you would have lost money in mutual funds and the like over a 5 or 10 year period.

Gold's only value as a real "investment" is banking on the idea that people will keep thinking it makes a good hedge. I will concede that betting on other people's foolishness is often not a bad wager, but I wouldn't call it "safe" by any stretch of the imagination.

Actually, gold is needed in nearly all electronics, from microprocessors to transistors and hard drives.

Gold is in fact perceived as a monetary metal (like Silver). Since money is largely a matter of perception it essentially will function as a currency for trading purposes if not purchasing things directly.

At a time when currencies are being printed in excess and their future value in question, Gold is a great place to put your money.

TIPS are terribly flawed because they have an absurdly low return and are based on govt metrics which they have an incentive to keep below actual inflation.

Inflation could easily be fast and pronounced and the value of any bond would end up plummeting.

Gold is one of the few places that you can rely on to preserve it's value. Granted it is expensive now, but in historic terms it is still not an inflation adjusted high and these are times which suggest alternative investments like Gold (and Silver) may be the only safe havens left.