Greg Mankiw has a post on investing in gold. I think I actually agree that gold investing has a bad name; it's the people who suggest putting all of your wealth into it that scare me the most. Any single commodity as an asset class is a bad investment. Gold tends to be volatile in price, which isn't ideal either.
But I also think there can be one more good reason to hold gold -- you like collecting it. As collectables go, I would be more confident in a gold coin collection holding value than a baseball card or comic book collection. I could be wrong on this point, especially for specific items. But it's not an insane hobby to have. I am actually more sympathetic to it than I am to junk silver, where the collections tend to not have the aesthetic appeal of gold and the circumstances under which the silver would make a good store of wealth seem more limited.
So it's not an insane idea to invest in gold as a collectable or as a part of a portfolio. But it is an odd stance to take as a principal means of savings. But that doesn't seem to make it ever go completely out of fashion.
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