Anon contributes:

Re: the graph above. A slight correction to yesterday’s chart of gold prices, because I was like, wait, what? Did it really happen that way, that the price of gold was flat until 1971? So I looked up the gold price for 100 years, you can see it at https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart This graph looks accurate, I cross-checked against several sources.

The thickest gray vertical line is the Great Depression of 1929. Gold is a hedge (“insurance”) against the apocalypse itself – when everything is collapsing, gold remains a valuable rare commodity that is also necessary in production of electronics. As the Great Depression unfolded in 1930’s, people used gold to store value, and its price went up. A decade later, as people’s faith in government was slowly restored, they reduced their usage of gold as container of value, by half. In 5 more years, the shock of the Great Depression wore off and gold price returned to its then-balance of $400/oz. This seems reasonable. Gold also has its own economics: the largest gold mine sets the price worldwide.

But yeah, it appepars that the price of gold was indeed flat (excluding that one catastrophic exception) until the 70’s. Importantly, the first graph from yesterday seems to be gold price indexed to the nominal dollar. The graph from today is the gold price indexed to the real dollar (accounting for inflation). Observe the difference.