At present prices gold has little practical use, except as money. So if you buy gold, you are buying insurance against paper money going to hell, and people using gold as money. When the $%@# hits the fan, you will be able to eat, and maybe buy some assets cheaply. On the other hand, if the $%@# never hits the fan, you will probably lose money over time, because gold’s value as anything other than money is considerably less than you are paying. For any use other than money, gold is far overpriced.
Martin Murenbeeld reports that people are starting to use gold as money and a store of value – not that you will be able to use it to buy an airline ticket out of trouble any time soon, but there are arguably signs that the wind begins to blow.
We recently saw entertaining video of people in Zimbabwe using billion zim notes to wrap a few tiny precious fragments of gold, and using the gold to buy food.