F-ck gold. It’s worthless.
Who’s mad already?!
I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Mostly. I just can’t help myself. It cracks me up that some of you folks take all this seriously enough to get mad about it, where “all this” means not only macro-market debates and portfolio allocation decisions, but life in general and indeed even what you think you see and experience.
I’ve got some very distressing news for you. None of this is real, and I don’t just mean the stocks, bonds and money. Space and time aren’t real either. Those are just mental frameworks we use to order sensory information. There’s no there there. Anywhere. And the term “anywhere” is itself meaningless.
So, you know, lighten up. Because it’s all an illusion and sooner or later, you and me and everybody else will merge with eternity, never to experience anything again.
That’s the big(gest) picture and when considered in that context, the heated debate about gold in 2025, and indeed heated debates about anything at all, seem pretty trivial, no?
There’s the chart. Of gold’s second worst week this year. Spot prices were down a whole 3.5%. Not even that, actually.
Note that this was the first down week in 10 and only the second in 13. Bullion was, and still is, due for a break.
That said, the Fed’s determined to devalue the dollar by cutting rates with inflation still running a full percentage point above target and a key measure of longer run inflation expectations perched nearly two full percentage points above the Committee’s ostensible goal.
The case for gold is therefore intact. Or that’s certainly what someone who holds a lot of gold would tell you. Of course, someone who holds a lot of gold would tell you a lot of other things too, like there might be alien corpses at Area 51. So take anything they say with a grain of salt. And with a package of freeze-dried survival food.
All jokes aside (there are never too many jokes), you can also construct a bull case for bullion around the idea that investors are Underweight.
The figure on the left, above, gives you a sense of how much room there might be for investors to re-allocate away from cash, stocks and bonds in favor of bullion. The figure on the right shows you that re-allocation process unfolding, albeit not in bullion per se, but rather in paper gold.
“Gold inflows over the past four months are greater than the inflows of the prior 14 years,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett remarked. For 2025, gold’s annualizing a $108 billion influx. That’d be the largest annual haul on record.
So, you know, go get you some gold! If I’m wrong about the (absence of an) afterlife and you’re not current on the collection plate, you’ll need to make it up at the Pearly Gates. And they might not accept pieces of paper adorned with the picture of a man who owned 123 slaves outright and 317 overall.
But doesn’t the Holy Bible sanction the ownership of slaves?
There are no guarantees there’s a “you” or “we”, if you take the skeptic tack. There are credible theories of neuroscience where consciousness has no agency. There’s no need for personal continuity to match observations, i.e. you tell yourself and other people a story of personal continuity for social purposes, but there’s no need for that story to be true as opposed to “dying” every time you are unconscious and telling a story when you are not, and credible science shows personal memories are unreliable. So why worry about death before its time when we don’t know anything? But if one does, the Romans said it well with NFFNSNC. Could put that on one’s tombstone, but if one internalized the meaning, why care about one’s tombstone? But even with a static allocation to gold, and everything meaningless, gold articles are must click for the jokes.
(that should read “you” or “we” in the sense commonly used as you can be reasonably assured you have some brain activity when you are experiencing things, just it might not mean what you think it does)
If there’s one thing there isn’t enough of, it’s jokes. Looking back at my own life, jokes are what have kept me going much of the time, specially the ability to laugh at myself. If only there was a ticker symbol.
The only thing that would make gold better in this crazy environment would be gold in the shape of tulips.