10/17/2026
Got Gold?
The price of the house did not change. The price of the currency did. That one shift explains nearly everything wrong with how most people think about wealth and inflation.
In 1929, the average American home cost roughly $6,000. A single standard gold bar, at the then-fixed price of around $20.67 per troy ounce, was worth over $8,000, meaning one bar alone could cover the cost of a home and then some.
Today, that same home costs somewhere north of $400,000. A single gold bar, at current market prices, would still come close to covering it outright.
The house did not become more valuable. The dollar became less of one.
This is the distinction that most conversations about inflation quietly skip over. When people say "housing is unaffordable," they are usually right. But they are describing a symptom. The underlying condition is something older and more structural: the slow, steady erosion of what a unit of currency can actually purchase.
Gold has no central bank. Nobody prints more of it when a government needs to finance a war or stabilize a collapsing bank. Its supply grows at roughly the rate of new mining, which over the long run has tracked population and economic output closely enough to hold its real value. This is not a coincidence or a mystical property. It is the definition of a store of value behaving the way a store of value is supposed to.
The dollar in 1929 was partially backed by gold. In 1971, that link was severed entirely. In the decades since, the money supply has expanded at a pace that no commodity can match.
None of this means gold is a perfect asset or that returning to a gold standard is wise or workable. Economists disagree sharply on that question, and the historical record is genuinely complicated. What the 1929-to-2026 comparison does is simpler than a policy argument: it holds a mirror up to a century of monetary change and asks you to look at what you see.
You are not richer because your house is worth more dollars. You are holding more dollars that are each worth less.
The gold your great-grandfather could have bought in 1929 would not just match the price of that house today. It would dwarf it. The dollars he saved in a tin under the floorboards would buy a used appliance.
That is not an argument for hoarding gold. It is an argument for understanding what money actually is, and what it is not.
Some things hold value across time. The units we use to measure value do not always follow.
