>Since someone brought it up...I'm curious. What I see in the
>capitalist press are two contradictory positions:
>
>1. Gold is commodity and like all commodities, its value will go down.
The value of most commodities goes down because there are lots of substitutes for them, and productivity in basic extractive industries doesn't grow anywhere near as fast as in more advanced sectors, so the relative prices of commodities are almost always in decline. Not gold, for which there are few substitutes.
>2. Gold is the species of last resort and given the uncertainty
>about the dollar, euro, and yen, it will go up.
If there's a generalized flight from paper assets, yes. But over the very long term, gold's trend is pretty much flat in real terms - which make sense, since it's supposed to be a store of purchasing power.
Doug