Gold as money: why every civilisation chose it

0:00For 5,000 years, every major civilisation on Earth agreed on the same thing. Egyptians, Romans, Chinese dynasties, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, all of them across different continents, different languages, different gods, they all landed on the same answer. Gold. Gold is money.

0:20Then about 50 years ago, a handful of governments got together and said, "Nah, we've got a better idea. Trust us. This paper stuff here is money now." And here's the thing, that paper experiment, it's starting to fail. And the people who don't understand why gold matters are going to be the ones left wondering what happened to their savings, their purchasing power, and their retirement.

0:48So today, I'm going to make sure that's not you. My name is Felix Prehn. I'm an ex investment banker and an economist. And today we're going to dive deep on gold. I don't mean should you buy gold like everybody talks about that all day long, but what is gold really? Why did every civilisation choose it and what does it tell us about the money in your pocket right now?

1:12So here's what we're covering here. 3 parts. 1, what gold actually is and why it is not an investment the way you think it is. 2, what happens in 1971 and why your dollar has lost over 90% of its value since. And then 3, guess what central banks are doing right now with gold and what that means for you and your portfolio.

1:38If that sounds good, let's get into it. But first, I put together a about a 20 or 30 page gold research report for you. It covers everything in this video plus the data, the charts, the historical timeline, allocation frameworks, all of it to really get you up to an investment banking framework of understanding gold. And it's free. There's no catch. There's a link in the description below. You just join our free community. There are well over 30,000 people in there. And you just read it, grab it. Links down below in the description.

2:12Now, what is gold really? So my mentor years ago told me something that rewired how I think about money. And he said something like, "Felix, follow what can't be printed." That was it. 5 words. Follow what can't be printed. And once you hear that, you actually can't unhear it. It changes how you look at everything. Stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, and especially gold.

2:41Because here's the question nobody really asks. Out of every element on the periodic table, you remember that in school, that horrible table you had to remember. There are 118 elements, why did humanity pick gold? Was it random? Was it just pretty? It's shiny. No. It turns out gold is almost engineered to be money. And let me show you.

3:10First, it does not corrode. Gold doesn't rust. It doesn't tarnish. It doesn't react with air or water. You can literally pull a gold coin out of a shipwreck after 400 years on the ocean floor and it looks basically the same. Try that with iron. Try that with copper. They fall apart. They disintegrate.

3:30And second, it is divisible. What it means is you can melt it, you can cut it, you can shape it into coins, bars, tiny flakes. It doesn't lose its property. Every piece is as pure as the whole one.

3:49And then third, it is, and here's another word we don't use very often, malleable. What does that mean? Well, 1 ounce of gold can be hammered into a sheet that'll cover like 100 square feet. You can make it into wire thinner than a human hair. It's workable.

4:07And then fourth, and this is really the key one here, it is actually scarce. It can't be created. It can't be synthesised like diamonds. It can't be printed. You have to dig it out of the ground. And there is only so much of it.

4:22Now, here's the number that blows people's mind. All the gold ever mined in human history. All of it going back thousands of years. Every pharaoh's tombs, every central bank vault, every wedding ring, every Olympic medal. I don't think they're fully gold anymore, by the way. If you melted it all down into one big cube, it would fit inside 3 and a half Olympic swimming pools. That's it. Just 3 and a half Olympic swimming pools, which isn't really all that much, is it? 8 billion people and we have 3 and a half Olympic pools of gold in the world.

5:12But this is important. You need to understand a distinction that most people, even most financial people, get wrong. Gold is not an investment. And why is it not an investment? The gold people are going nuts right now. Give me a second. An investment is something that generates cash flow. A rental property generates rent. A stock generates earnings. A bond pays interest. Gold just sits there. It doesn't do anything. Doesn't pay you a dividend. It doesn't grow revenue. So what is it?

5:49Gold is one thing. Gold is money. It is a store of value. It's a measuring stick. It's the thing that reveals whether your other money, the paper stuff, the digital stuff, your real estate, whether it's actually holding its value or not.

6:05And here's a thought. A Roman soldier, a centurion, a seniorish soldier, 2,000 years ago, he earned about 1 ounce of gold per month. That was a pretty good salary back then. He was out there killing people. He had to get paid. He was a professional soldier. He was a middle class soldier.

6:26Now, 1 ounce of gold in Rome would buy you a quality toga, a leather belt, and a pair of sandals. Essentially, a very high quality nice outfit, like a quality suit today. Right now, fast forward 2,000 years, and an ounce of gold today is what is it? $4,000 and something right now, give or take. At the time I'm recording this about $4,700. Obviously, this is going to change.

6:57This is a Golden Nettles news and data service that we have which is something you're super happy to join if you wish. There's a link down below. It's about $6 a week. If you don't like it, you can cancel anytime. One of the things we look at, for example, is what are all the central banks in the world doing. And we'll maybe touch upon that a little bit here. You can see the Germans were selling some, for example, or Turkey, big sell off there and so on. And that's quite useful.

7:24But let's get back to the story. If you think about what does $4,000 buy you today, it buys you a good suit, maybe from a nice brand or a tailor, and then a nice pair of high quality shoes and a nice belt and maybe a shirt and a tie with it and you're pretty much there. Now, can you get it cheaper? Yes, of course you can. But you could also in Roman times, but the centurion had a standard.

7:53So literally 2,000 years ago, an ounce of gold buys pretty much the same thing. Gold didn't go up. It didn't perform well. Gold actually stayed the same. It's the dollar that moved. It's the paper that lost value. Gold is just sitting there being gold, doing what it's done for 5,000 years, telling you the truth about your currency, what it's actually worth. Gold is money. It is not an investment.

8:30All right. So gold is money. Real money. The kind that worked for literally 5,000 years. So what the heck happened? How did we end up with this stuff here, the piece of papers? Sometimes cotton, sometimes plastic, whatever, with a bit of ink on it. How did this become money?

8:45Well, let me walk you through it because the history is actually wild and insanely important to understand so you can make better decisions today. And I promise by the end of this section, you're going to look at every dollar in your wallet or in your bank account very, very different.

9:02So before 1971, the US dollar wasn't a piece of paper. It was a receipt. Literally, if you had a dollar, you had a claim on gold. You could walk into a bank and say, "I'd like my gold, please." And they'd give it to you. The dollar was backed by hard physical gold. The money was gold. The gold is just a little heavy to carry around. And cutting it into pieces was annoying. So we had paper, it's more convenient.

9:27Now this system got formalised after World War II. 1944, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. I haven't been, I've been to New Hampshire, which is lovely, but not to Bretton Woods. Anyway, 44 countries got together and said, "All right, the US has most of the world's gold because the US was actually the major beneficiary of the war. So the US dollar will be pegged to gold." And they said $35 is 1 ounce of gold. And every other currency is going to be pegged, as in linked, to the dollar.

10:04So the dollar was as good as gold. That's where that phrase comes from. And every other currency was as good as the dollar. So the whole global financial system was anchored to this one physical thing that couldn't be printed, couldn't be faked, it couldn't be inflated away. It worked for a while. 50s, early 60s, we had stability, growth. The American middle class was built during that period. And the gold standard was the foundation.

10:34And then the 60s happened. Vietnam, the war was expensive, very expensive. The Great Society programmes kicked in, also

10:40Very expensive. And the US government was spending more than it had, a lot more. And here's the problem with a gold standard. You can't print your way out of it. If you're spending more, you need more dollars. If you need more dollars, you need more gold. And there wasn't more gold.

11:01So other countries started to notice. And one country in particular called the bluff. France, the French president essentially said, "We don't trust that you have enough gold to back up all these dollars you're printing. We want our gold. Ship it over." France literally sent a warship to New York to collect their gold from the Federal Reserve vault. That's not a metaphor. They literally sent a navy vessel to pick up gold bars.

11:27When other countries started lining up, Britain, others, everybody wanted their gold. So it was a run on the bank of banks, except the bank was the United States of America. So on August 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon went on television and interrupted Bonanza.

11:47That must have been a shock for Americans. And he said, "We are temporarily suspending the convertibility of the dollar into gold." 54 years ago, still temporary, apparently. So in one speech on a Sunday night while interrupting a cowboy show, the link between the dollar and gold was severed forever after. The anchor was cut. And from that point forward, the dollar wasn't backed by gold. It was backed by silver. Nope. Backed by anything? Not really. It's backed by a promise, a signature, really, a government's promise.

12:27And that's what we call fiat currency. Cheap Italian car, but it's actually Latin for "let it be." The money has value because the government says it has value. That's it. That's the whole thing. Fiat currency, trust us, it's worth something.

12:51And maybe you're saying, look, it works, doesn't it? I mean, I buy stuff with dollars every day. What's the freaking problem here? Why are you droning on about this? But the problem isn't that it doesn't work. The problem is what it does to you over time. And that's section 3.

13:06So let's make this visual for you. 1971, a dollar was essentially gold. Now gold is limited in supply. You can't print unlimited dollars. So what does it mean? It means stable prices, because there are only so many dollars and therefore we don't really get inflation. Gold is scarce. Scarcity limits printing. Limited printing means your prices don't go nuts. Your savings hold their value. Your paycheck buys roughly the same stuff year after year.

13:47And then we get after 1971. Dollar is now basically backed by nothing, nothing more than a promise. Some say by the might of the American military and all that. Yeah, but that's just to make you feel better, right? There is no limit on how many dollars you can print. So what do governments do? Governments print whenever they feel like it, right? All the time. 2000, 2001, 2008, COVID. Every time there is something a bit wrong in the world they say, I'll just print money, it'll fix everything, everybody gets more dollars, everybody be happy, everybody will love me.

14:29What happens? Prices go up and up and up and up, right? And that is what we call inflation. They go up forever. That's the whole story. Everything else, the inflation debate, the national debt, the cost of living, all that flows from this one change. You cut the anchor and the ship drifts. And we've been drifting for 50 odd years.

14:55So let me show you what that actually looks like in real numbers. There's a chart from the Fed. In 1981, there were about $860 billion, right? And then they've discontinued this measure, by the way, because it gets embarrassing. But in 2021, we had $22,000 billion. So we went up like 30 times. And then the new measure still shows us at about that level. It makes me wonder why they discontinued the old one. Probably because it keeps going up and up.

15:28And yes, this crazy increase here, this hockey stick thing, that was COVID. The US government printed 40% of all the dollars in existence in just 18 months. 40% of all the dollars. The dollar has been around for like 100 plus years and in just 18 months 40% of the dollars that are around right now were printed in 18 months.

15:50Right? So what does that do to the value of the thing? A 1971 dollar is today worth how much? How much do you think it's worth? Go on, put it in the chats down below. I'll give you 1, 2, 3 seconds to do that. $1, so that was 100 cents, right? Then today that same dollar is worth about 7 cents. It's a demolition of the value of the dollar.

16:15Think about what that means for your parents, your grandparents. Somebody who saved diligently in the 70s, they put that money in the bank and they did the right thing. That money has lost 93% of its purchasing power. 93% down. It's not because they did anything wrong. It's because the rules changed and they didn't realise it.

16:39Now maybe you still think this doesn't affect you, but when the government prints money, whether it's to pay for wars, stimulus checks, bank bailouts, whatever. Obviously the bank bailouts are required. I had some friends who worked at Lehman Brothers, they were pretty hit pretty hard. I mean, some of them delayed the purchase of a new Ferrari, right? So they deserve the bailout money.

17:04But that new money, in all seriousness, what does it do? It dilutes the value of the money you have. It's the same as if a company issued a billion new shares of stock. Now you still have shares, they don't disappear, but they are worth less because there are more of them. Inflation is not prices going up. Inflation is your money going down.

17:29And that creates one of the biggest, quietest wealth transfers in history. From whom? The money goes from savers to who? Borrowers. And that's an odd concept. Literally the money goes from the responsible people to the people who are borrowing money. It also goes from people who are holding cash to people who have assets. So it goes essentially from the working class to the asset owning class.

18:02So if you're in a house, gold, stocks, inflation will lift your net worth. You will look more wealthy. But if you're saving in cash, if you're working for a wage, inflation eats you alive. And maybe you've noticed that, right? If you notice that, put it down below in the comments. It does it slowly, very quietly, every single year. And none of that was possible when money was actually gold.

18:24Right now, let me show you what's happening right now that almost nobody's talking about, because here is where it gets puzzling and maybe a little hypocritical. For decades, central bankers, finance ministers, treasury officials, they called gold a barbarous relic. Literally, that's a quote, by the way. It goes back to Keynes, lunatic lefty economist. We had to study that nonsense. And they said gold is outdated, gold is a pet rock, gold has no place in the modern financial system where we have to bail out the bankers every decade.

19:02No. What they're doing right now, this year, central banks around the world, actually last year, central banks around the world bought about, let me pull up the exact data for you. I go into my market intel thing here, where you can see what institutions are doing with gold and silver every single week, and the COMEX inventories and all that kind of stuff, which is an interesting, frightful chart.

19:27But what you can also see is central banks in 2025 bought over 1,000 tonnes of gold, which is pretty crazy. And we've seen that accelerate, 2022 to 2023 to 2024 to 2025, record purchase after purchase. So who's buying it? Poland, China, Brazil, Turkey, India, Kazakhstan, everybody, especially the emerging markets.

19:50Why are they doing it? 3 reasons. Reason number 1, de-dollarisation. These countries are reducing their dependence on the US dollar, just like 71. They don't trust the dollar as much. And why? Because gold doesn't have a foreign policy. Gold isn't going to invade you. Gold can't be printed by someone else to pay their war bills.

20:12Second reason, sanctions risk. And this is huge. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the US and Western allies froze about $300 billion of Russia's foreign reserves that were held mostly in US dollars, right? So if you're Russia, you're like, that's not good. Now, what if you're any other country in the world? You're like, well, they did it to Russia, they could do it to me if I do something that they don't like. I decide to become a despot and invade somebody, which some of these countries might have aspirations towards.

20:46So if you're these countries and you hold all your money, all your reserves, all your savings essentially in dollars, what are you going to do? You're like, how about we just buy gold and store it in the basement? That way they can't get to it. They can't sanction it. They can't freeze it. And they can't click a button and make it disappear.

21:07And then the third reason is debt. Central bankers can read a chart. They can see that the US has close to $40 trillion in debt, a trillion every 100 days is being added. And they're looking at that and they're not doing this publicly, obviously, not a press conference, because they don't want to piss off the great big American bear. But in the allocation decisions they're basically hedging. They're saying maybe we should just hold a little more of the thing that's worked for the last 5,000 years, just in case the 50-year experiment gets rocky.

21:47And for those of you who've been in the gold for a little while, you know we've had a really beautiful ride, right? We made

21:52A lot of money on gold. Year on year, as I'm recording this, we're up about 65%. And the physical stuff is getting scarcer. You can see that the COMEX levels here have come down very significantly of how much gold they actually hold in the last 12 months. Similar story for silver.

22:08But when you zoom out and you think about when was the last time central banks and Wall Street banks were this aligned on the same trade. Think about central banks are buying gold hundreds and hundreds of tons. Investment banks are raising the price targets for gold to $5,000, $6,000 and retail demand is climbing. So everybody agrees, the People's Bank of China, JP Morgan Chase, the Fed, the Poles, everybody, which is curious and possibly a bull case scenario.

22:40Now, I'm not a financial adviser. I'm not telling you what to do. I just want to make sure you really understand what's going on here with gold so you have the full picture. Before you run out and put all your money into it, which I don't encourage you to do in any way, shape, or form, let me give you the risks and the opportunities here because you wanted to understand both so you can be honest with yourself.

22:59Now, before we do that, you might have gotten this far. You might be like, okay, but I need to know when do I buy this, right? Was it a buy now? Was it a sell now? And if that's you, I've got something for you too, which is a 15 minute master class you can watch at felix.org/getfree, which will literally tell you Wall Street's framework for deciding when they buy and why. It's very simple. Three steps, you can learn it in 15 minutes. Felix.org/getfree, it's completely free, part of our mission here to make more people financially independent.

23:30So what are the risks? Well, if you hold cash because you're waiting for some sort of nana off the stock market and you think, well, the cash is safe, right? It's safe, it's safe. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. In the short term, you're right. But in the long term, your cash is a guaranteed loser. Remember that $971? It's worth 7 cents today.

23:54So if you got lots of money sitting in a savings account that's getting you 1, 2, 3% maybe interest, inflation is running at a much, much higher. So you're losing purchasing power every single year. It's a slow bleed and you don't feel it day to day, which is the dangerous part, but you'll feel it when you try to buy a house in 5 or 10 years. You will feel it when you retire and the numbers don't quite add up. Cash is not safe. Cash is a slow guaranteed bleed and the longer you sit in it the more it's going to cost you.

24:26The second risk is ignoring the macro shift. The world is changing. We've got de-dollarisation. Dollar reserves have dropped significantly. There's a lot going on in the whole world here. And we track a lot of the stuff that's going on, like what's going on in the Middle East right now or whatever. And as long as it's related back to gold and silver prices and so on, we put it in here. You can literally see everything, energy, infrastructure, tropical storms, central bank buying and selling and all that kind of stuff. Even earthquakes because they're important if they happen near important mines, for example.

25:02But a big part of the world, the BRICS countries are looking at creating a non-dollar world. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's actually data from the IMF and the World Gold Council and the Bank of International Settlements and all these other lovely organisations that have your best interest at heart. Trust me.

25:21Now you don't have to believe the dollar is going to collapse. I don't think it is. Not tomorrow, not next year. But if you are not even aware of this slow shift, just like the cash in your savings account, it's gradually losing its importance and its status.

25:38But there is a third risk here, and that's buying gold the wrong way. Not all gold is the same. There's physical gold, there are ETFs, there are mining stocks, there are future contracts, and they're all different instruments with different risk profiles. So you need to understand all of those things together. And if you wanted me to go into that, let me know that in the comments down below and we can make a follow-up video of that as well.

26:00But let me walk you through the opportunities. Opportunity side, the happy side, physical gold and gold ETFs. That's your foundation. And a lot of people are suggesting 5 to 15% allocation. I'm not telling you what to do. It depends on who you are and your financial setup generally. But it's a financial insurance policy. Sovereign wealth funds, family offices, they hold somewhere in that range, typically 5 to 15%. Not 50%, not zero, not 90%.

26:28And if you hold that in physical gold, coins, bars, you hold it. Nobody can take it from you. But you can of course store it in a storage venue, which is what I would recommend if it becomes a serious amount. And that's the downside. You need to insure it. It doesn't generate any income.

26:45Now, there are gold ETFs. There are things like GLD or IAU. They give you gold exposure without having to store it. They're liquid, they're cheap, they track the price. But the downside is you are trusting a financial institution. You don't hold the metal.

27:04And then we have gold mining stocks. This is where it gets interesting for people who want potentially more upside and are happy to trade a bit more actively. And that's one of the things we track significantly in here in terms of what's going on with the gold miners and so on. There's a live update here every single day which walks you through that and runs you through. There's a free newsletter in there as well in the community with a daily brief and so on. And a mining company, the beautiful thing with a mining company is, this has more risk by the way, but the way to look at that is it's just a leveraged play on gold.

27:41And then of course we have silver. And silver is interesting for the simple reasons that there is very, very little supply of it. Look at the COMEX inventory here. It's absolutely collapsing. And that is because it isn't just a money metal. There's a significant industrial demand for it. Electronics, solar panels, medical devices, all that stuff needs silver.

28:09Now there is something called the gold to silver ratio, like how many ounces of silver it takes to buy an ounce of gold. And when that ratio is very high, like 80 or 90, it typically means silver is really cheap and then it snaps back. Right now it's sitting at 62. It's about average. So it isn't neither really overvalued or undervalued historically speaking, but in my humble opinion, the industrial demand is pretty significant. Again, you have to actually come to your own conclusions there. And one way we see that is the physical silver premiums are significantly above the paper price.

28:41Now, my hope is that this video has given you a much better and deeper insight into gold. I'm not a gold salesman. We never take sponsorships on this channel from anybody really. Really nobody ever. I got pitched by gold and silver miners every single day to interview the CEOs and that sort of thing. And I'll never do it because I like to be able to give you guys an independent view of it. Do I hold some gold and silver? Yes, I do. Maybe I should also put that in there as a disclaimer.

29:07But I just come back to what we started with. 5,000 years. There are only 3 and a half Olympic size swimming pools of gold. We got 8 billion people and it's run the world for 5,000 years. And I don't think the last 50 years, which are a tiny blip in the space of time, have really changed that.

29:24So while gold isn't a magic solution, I think it is part of the answer. I think it is also a fire alarm. It goes off, it tells you something about the state of the world and the economy and everything else. The fact that central banks are buying it, fact that the US is adding $1 trillion in debt every 100 days and that's probably going to accelerate is something that makes me think this is more important than people realise.

29:49And one of my mentors, I learn everything I know from my Wall Street mentors, and he said to me, there is a newspaper moment for everything. So he said countries and the dollar don't decline from one day to the next. They decline the way newspapers did. Newspapers lost readers slowly for years and years and years and even decades. And everyone said, oh, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. And then suddenly one day they were gone.

30:16Decline was very gradual. And then suddenly most of the newspapers in the world disappeared. And the only ones around are the ones owned by billionaires because they like the influence it gives them. And I don't think you want to be the person reading about it in the newspaper, assuming newspapers will still exist at the time. You want to be the person who understood it before it was really, really obvious because the market is ultimately about time frames.

30:43So let me leave you with this. Gold is a 5,000 year old lie detector for governments. Doesn't care about politics. It doesn't care about elections. It doesn't care about press conferences or central banks. It sits there. It's very patient. Tells you the truth. When gold is rising, it's telling you something. It's telling you that somewhere, somehow, trust in the

31:03System is slipping away. And right now, gold is telling you that you can ignore it or you can understand it. And if you want to really go deeper, grab the free research report that we put out for you down below in the free community. And if you really want to understand more about the rules that Wall Street's been using for 50 years, coincidence on the timing perhaps, when we buy what asset, what stock, gold or silver or anything else, go to felix/getfree, watch that free video that I made for you as well. And I love you watching, all the best.

31:38Did you know there is an invisible system that controls nearly every trade on the planet? And I don't mean supply and demand. I don't mean the Federal Reserve.