Compared to what? My guess is it’s a better bet than most currencies during that time, aside from a few winners that it would have been hard to predict ahead of time. E.g., if 200 years ago, you had taken the most powerful countries and their currencies, and put your money into those, I predict you’d be much worse off than gold.
200 years ago was 1824. So compared to buying land or company stocks (the London and NY stock exchanges were well established by then) or government bonds.
Some quick calculations from chatGPT puts the value from a british government bond (considered the world power then) at about equal to the value of gold, assuming a fixed interest rate of 3% with gold coming out slightly ahead.
I haven’t really checked these calculations but they pass the sniff test (except the part where chatGPT tried to adjust todays dollars for inflation).
Compared to what? My guess is it’s a better bet than most currencies during that time, aside from a few winners that it would have been hard to predict ahead of time. E.g., if 200 years ago, you had taken the most powerful countries and their currencies, and put your money into those, I predict you’d be much worse off than gold.
200 years ago was 1824. So compared to buying land or company stocks (the London and NY stock exchanges were well established by then) or government bonds.
Some quick calculations from chatGPT puts the value from a british government bond (considered the world power then) at about equal to the value of gold, assuming a fixed interest rate of 3% with gold coming out slightly ahead.
I haven’t really checked these calculations but they pass the sniff test (except the part where chatGPT tried to adjust todays dollars for inflation).