Point taken, but the reason to use gold as the reference point vs the other commodities you listed, is that gold has a history of being money. The others do not, to a remotely close degree (I know I know, copper pennies). Does that continue? I don't know, but central bank buying and gold being a Tier I HQLA under Basel III sure makes it look like it will. You have to pick SOMETHING to have as a reference point. As Blazin said the dollar is a two bit whore, so why not gold? Certainly has it's own dynamics that can be manipulated but comparing returns priced in dollars vs returns priced in gold is illustrative, at least to me.
For the record, copper also beat stocks over the last 25 years, but not by a lot.
Gold isn't special because it reveals some hidden, objective truth about value. It's special because we collectively decided, over long stretches of history, to treat it that way under very specific technological and institutional constraints. Scarcity, durability, divisibility - all those mattered then. That doesn't mean gold is
eternally entitled to be the measuring stick for all value across all future systems. Treating it like that starts to look less like analysis and more like tradition-worship.
When people say "stocks lost money priced in gold," what they're really saying is "stocks underperformed one specific asset with its own supply/demand dynamics, central bank behavior, and speculative cycles." That's not the same thing as proving value destruction. Gold can outperform equities for long stretches without equities somehow being a fraud or CPI being a total lie. Relative performance != universal truth.
The part that smacks of dogma to me is that gold gets treated as if it's outside the system (some mythical neutral yardstick) when in reality it's deeply embedded in it. Central banks buy gold as a policy choice. Its price is influenced by real rates, dollar strength, geopolitics, reserve management, and investor psychology. That's not "pure money," that's just another asset with privileged historical branding.
That's why a lot of this framing feels very, "I listened to a podcast about Creature from Jekyll Island one time.” Like once you've internalized "gold is money, everything else is credit," you feel like you've unlocked a hidden layer of reality the normies can't see anymore. But repeating that mantra doesn't automatically make gold the one true lens through which all economic outcomes must be judged.
You're right that you have to pick
something as a reference point but that choice is subjective, not ordained. Gold isn't the only commodity that preserved purchasing power, and it's not the only thing that can. Copper beating stocks over 25 years kind of undercuts the idea that monetary history alone makes gold uniquely qualified as the truth-revealer.
Because you can't print gold, or grow it
You also can't print Manhattan real estate, vintage art, rare wine, beachfront property, or prime farmland - yet all of those are absolutely subject to boom/bust cycles, manipulation, financialization, and long periods of underperformance. Scarcity alone has
never guaranteed monetary supremacy or stable value.
Gold isn't immune either. Its supply
does grow. Mining output increases with price incentives, new extraction tech, and discoveries. It's slower than fiat, sure, but it's not fixed. More importantly, gold's price has been heavily influenced by futures markets, central bank policy, leasing, rehypothecation, and paper claims that vastly exceed physical supply. "Can't print it" didn't stop that at all.
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