Warren is correct that gold is a poor "investment" in the same vein that a Picasso/fine art, old wine, intergenerational (not buy-to-flip) land possession, vint

Warren is correct that gold is a poor "investment" in the same vein that a Picasso/fine art, old wine, intergenerational (not buy-to-flip) land possession, vintage cars are. That is, they may well appreciate with or outstrip inflation, but they are not really meant to earn a yield "productively" like crop and ExxonMobile shares do. They aren't "investments" in the proper, classical "value investor" sense, they are wealth assets in their own right. Even Ben Bernanke knew that much and told the world in the open! But Warren doesn't know gold's usefulness? Give me a break. Gold isn't an investment in the same way a life preserver isn't a treadmill. Both have their time and place in life. Non-productive, non-investment wealth assets: they don't stimulate much economic activity, but they also carry much lower counterparty and other risks and don't infringe on "everyone else's productive economic activity" by stockpiling needed resources in gigantic quantity when they could be put to productive economic use by the nation. Gold is so valuable here precisely because it's (economically) "so useless". You can't eat gold? That's precisely the point! Perfect hoarding medium. If you look back on a lifetime of very savvy investment work, like Warren does, you'll find your investments will have earned you much "excess income" that can be either put back into economically productive investments, or transformed into non-productive, non-counterparty-risk, by-and-large-in-the-long-run-value-preserving wealth assets. Many very wealthy people after a lifetime of earning excess income from economic/investment savvy do choose to "cash in some of their chips", so to speak. And over millenia, if they do so in assets that don't infringe on society's economic activity, everyone is better off and the hive will leave them alone. Warren may be one of the few who doesn't wish to do so, but he cannot possibly pretend not to know that this is Gold's proper and totally reasonable purpose in today's times. Other than massive Central Bank stockpiles that is, of course.