4 ms·

Super interesting, thanks for the link! It looks to be dropping though: https://www.economist.com/node/16536800 https://www.economist.com/node/16536800 >The m

• MrEldritch 8y ago
  Well, 30% of the market value of gold is from financial/SoV-type use cases! That's not insignificant. Because of the psychological consensus that gold is a decent place to store value - it's been one for several thousand years, you can reasonably assume that someone's still going to take it a few decades from now - that portion of its value fluctuates substantially depending on how interested people are in a literally solid and relatively-stable physical asset. So when people are uncertain about other investment prospects, they go to gold, because it's basically one step up from stuffing cash under your mattress insofar as gold is less subject to inflation. Crypto is ... currently, at least, not where you go if you want something with a reliable, stable value. And yeah, I think aesthetic value counts! It's also very much a psychological thing, and it's undeniably tied into a similar "I think this is valuable because other people will see it and think it looks valuable" loop; if gold were much cheaper, we wouldn't see as much gold jewelry. But it's also genuinely one of the better metals to make jewelry out of (doesn't corrode, ductile, nobody's allergic to it) and it's quite a pretty color. It's more fickle than industrial use, sure, but it's also much less fickle than investor speculation.