Below are two charts that I quickly found by Googling, they both go back about 100 years. I didn't check for accuracy but they tell an interesting story if they are accurate. My interpretation is that Real Estate outperformed Gold by a wide margin.
There is nothing to see. The long run "real" rates of return are ZERO for real estate. I don't need a chart.
In you graph, gold raises from around 0 to 2000, but house raise from around 0 to 200. Why do you think house return is better?
The disagreement comes from a different definition of 'getting out of the depression'. Same people (like me) call that having the sign from the rate of change switch from negative to positive in a sustainable way (aka a "recovery") getting out of the depression. Other people call having unemployment or some other metric pass some arbitrary line (say 12 or 10% unemployment or lower), getting out of the depression. I prefer the former because it helps you learn what stopped a self-reinforcing collapse so you don't get in one in the future. The latter is not as useful because you can pass that line through many policies that would only work if you are on the way up of the self-reinforcing cycle. When they are on the way down, they would not work as much
If I were to have 100K to invest between gold and RE, my thinking is very clear to me. Gold: a useless metal especially compared to others. NOT likely to replace fiat. Transaction fee to buy and sell, cost money to store it. Does not produce income. RE: Buy a home with the 100K (I can where I live). Rent for 1000/month. Taxes/insurance 2k/yr, income 10K/yr. 10% ROI. Transaction fees ignored, they would take a couple months to recover Buy 5 100K homes using leverage, finance 80K on each. Each rents for 1000/month. Payments to lender would be $480/month at 6% (378/month for sub 4%, possible for first 4 homes). Income: 5k/month-60K yr Expenses: Bank=28,800/yr, taxes/ins=12000/yr Net 20k/yr 20 % ROI--- but note for simplicity I overestimated bank note, insurance, and likely taxes. I'll take RE.
For gold buyers, do you prefer physical gold, futures or ETFs ? GLD seems hugely popular and is is available in various international exchanges. A problem I see with physical gold is it's difficult to take across borders, but is the 0.40% expense fee on GLD mostly accounting for physical gold custody fee ? Actually thinking of buying some metals for long term, but if platinum is lower than gold at the moment, it does look more atractive. Not familiar with platinum products though
Gold and silver are the best hedges against inflation. Gold soared 8x during the inflationary period of the 1970s.
Daal, I have a degree in Economics. I've studied the depression endlessly. We'll agree to disagree. I will say most Nobel Prize winning economists agree with me as well but what do they know right?