Gold, as a measuring stick.
Most of the time gold didn't go up — the dollar went down. Price gold against what competes with it — stocks, the money supply, the national debt — and a different story appears.
It once took just 1.6 ounces of gold to buy the Dow.
The Dow/Gold ratio strips out the dollar entirely: how many ounces of gold it takes to buy the whole Dow Jones index. It swung from barely one ounce at the 1932 and 1980 lows to 41× at the 1999 dot-com peak — and sits near 14× today. A low ratio means gold is dear and stocks are cheap; a high ratio means the reverse.
It is the single cleanest way to ask the only question that matters when you choose between the two — am I being paid to own businesses, or to own the metal? Read alongside gold versus other investments and what actually drives the price, the ratio has bottomed near 1 at every generational turning point.
Against the money supply, gold is at 39% of its 1980 valuation.
Divide the gold price by M2 — the quantity of dollars in existence — and the picture inverts. Relative to the money supply, gold peaked in 1980, collapsed to a 2001 low, and even at today's record nominal price sits at roughly 39% of its 1980 level.
By this monetary yardstick gold has lagged the printing press, not led it — a useful corrective to any pitch that the metal has “run too far.” It is also why gold tracks monetary policy and inflation more faithfully over decades than over any single year.
Gold has tracked the national debt almost dollar for dollar.
Since the dollar left gold in 1971, the gold price has risen roughly 84-fold and total US federal debt about 91-fold (debt is now 120.7% of GDP). Indexed to 1971 and drawn on a log scale, the two lines climb together — the clearest single picture of gold as a hedge against fiscal expansion.
That co-movement is no coincidence: when a government borrows faster than its economy grows, the value of each existing dollar erodes, and a finite metal is repriced upward. It is the same logic now driving record central-bank gold buying, and the reason the end of Bretton Woods still shapes every chart on this page.
Gold's great bull markets all sat on negative real rates.
Gold pays no interest, so it shines when cash and bonds lose to inflation — when the real, after-inflation 10-year yield turns negative. The shaded bands mark those years: the 1970s, the 2008–2012 aftermath, and 2020–2023. Gold's biggest advances line up almost exactly with them.
The flip side is just as sharp: when real rates turn positive, holding a yieldless metal carries a cost — and that is precisely when gold suffered its worst drawdowns. Today the ex-post real 10-year sits near +1.7% — a headwind, not a tailwind.
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Methodology. Annual series, 1900–2025. Gold (London market, nominal US$/oz) and the Dow Jones year-end close: MeasuringWorth (Officer & Williamson). M2, federal debt, debt-to-GDP and the 10-year Treasury yield: the Federal Reserve via FRED; the real rate is that yield minus CPI inflation (US BLS / MeasuringWorth). Charts price gold in nominal dollars — the debasement is the point. As of June 2026. Nothing here is investment advice.