Gold as an inflation hedge

Published 3 September 2026

"Gold protects you from inflation" is one of the oldest sentences in investing, and most people who repeat it have never looked up a gold price. This piece is for them. It explains what inflation does to money, what gold actually is as a thing you own, and what "hedge" means. Then it lays out two well-known research findings that seem to disagree, and shows why they don't. It is an explainer, not a verdict: whether the sentence holds up is a separate check, and it is next in our queue.

First, what inflation does to money you keep

Inflation is a rise in the general level of prices. When people say "inflation was three percent", they mean a basket of everyday things cost about three percent more than a year earlier. Your money isn't taken from you. It just buys a little less each year.

That "a little less" adds up. Put €10,000 in a drawer today. If prices rise 2% a year, that drawer money buys the equivalent of about €8,200 of today's goods after ten years, and about €6,700 after twenty. At 5% a year the same drawer is down to about €6,100 after ten years and about €3,800 after twenty. The notes haven't changed. The shop has. Figure 2 shows the two paths.

This is why two words come up again and again below. A nominal number is the number written on the note or the price tag. A real number is that same number after inflation has been taken out, so it tells you what the money buys. An investment that goes from €100 to €110 while prices rise 10% has a nominal gain of ten percent and a real gain of nothing. Whenever gold is discussed, the first thing to ask is which of the two you are looking at.

Keep that drawer in mind. "Gold protects you from inflation" is a claim about the drawer: that if you had put gold in it instead of notes, it would buy the same groceries years later.

What gold is, as a thing you own

Before the numbers, it's worth being clear about what kind of thing gold is, because it is different from most of what people invest in. A share is a slice of a company; while you hold it, the company earns money and may pay you some of it as a dividend. A bond is a loan; while you hold it, the borrower pays you interest on fixed dates. Both of them produce something for their owner along the way, whatever their price does.

Gold produces nothing while you hold it. No interest, no dividend, no rent. A bar in a vault in 2026 is the same bar in 2036. Its worth to you on the day you sell is exactly what the next buyer is willing to pay for it, and nothing else. That is what "store of value" means when the phrase is used honestly: gold stores value only in the sense that other people keep wanting it. Figure 3 puts the three side by side.

Warren Buffett made this argument in Berkshire Hathaway's 2011 shareholder letter, and it is the clearest version we know of, so we quote it as his view rather than as a measurement. Gold, he wrote, "has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative", and "if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end".⁴ His picture: the world's gold stock, about 170,000 tonnes, would fit in a cube of roughly 68 feet a side, and at the price he was writing at, $1,750 an ounce, was worth about $9.6 trillion. For the same money, he said, you could buy all US cropland plus sixteen Exxon Mobils and have a trillion left over.⁴ A century on, the farms and the companies would have produced enormous output; the cube would be the same cube.

A natural follow-on question is whether money put into gold is therefore "pulled out of the economy". We looked for a source that measures this and did not find one, so here is only what follows from the mechanics. When you buy gold, your money does not disappear: it goes to whoever sold you the gold, and they spend or invest it. What is true is narrower, and it is Buffett's point: the capital that is parked in gold builds no factory and lends to no one while it sits there. There is one place where new money does go in every year, and Buffett's letter points at it: newly mined supply. At the price he wrote at, a year's production was worth "about $160 billion", and buyers have to absorb that "to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices".⁴ Whether any of that matters for the economy as a whole is a bigger question than this piece, and we would rather leave it open than guess.

One more practical thing about owning gold: holding it physically usually costs something, for storage and insurance, and holding it through a fund costs an annual fee. A share or a bond can carry costs too, but those assets pay you along the way; gold's costs come out of an asset that pays nothing. None of that decides whether gold hedges inflation. It does mean that "keeps its value" has to be read as "before costs".

What "hedge" means, and the two things people mean by it

A hedge, in plain terms, is something you hold so that when one thing goes badly for you, something else goes well enough to make up for it. An inflation hedge would be an asset whose value rises when prices rise, so your purchasing power is protected.

Hidden in that sentence are two different claims, and almost every argument about gold comes from mixing them up:

• "Gold moves with inflation." When prices go up, the gold price tends to go up too. This is a claim about direction, and the usual way to measure it is a correlation: a number between minus one and plus one that says how consistently two things move together, year by year, allowing for how much each of them usually swings. Plus one means lockstep, zero means no relationship, minus one means they move opposite. A correlation is built from the yearly moves; it says nothing about where you end up after twenty of them.
• "Gold keeps your purchasing power." Money put into gold today buys about the same groceries in ten or twenty years. This is a claim about reliability over your horizon. It isn't answered by a correlation at all, but by asking: over the periods people actually save for, did an ounce of gold buy the same, more, or less?

The first can be true while the second is false. Two things can tend to move the same way and still drift far apart for twenty years at a stretch. Hold onto that distinction; it is the whole piece.

Finding one: since 1972, gold has moved with inflation, loosely

The first finding comes from the Global Investment Returns Yearbook, the long-run dataset assembled by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of London Business School and Cambridge, and published with UBS. In the free public summary of the 2025 edition, in a section on which assets hedge inflation, they report that since 1972 "changes in the gold price have had a positive correlation of 0.34 with inflation".² Gold and commodities, they write, "stand out with positive correlations to inflation"; an equally weighted basket of commodity futures scores 0.21, measured on its real return.

What does 0.34 mean? It is positive, so gold and inflation lean the same way. It is also a long way from one. In everyday terms: in a year when inflation is high, the gold price is somewhat more likely to be up than in a year when inflation is low, and that is all. It is not a rule you could plan around. The Yearbook's own next sentence adds the caveat: "while gold provided a potentially valuable hedge against inflation, in isolation it was also volatile and had a low long-run return".² One detail worth knowing: the sentence speaks of "changes in the gold price", but the chart it describes is titled as correlations between inflation and real returns, so the 0.34 most likely refers to gold's return after inflation. We quote the sentence as printed; the fine print shows our own sums both ways.

That is the 2025 edition. A 2026 edition is out, with data through the end of 2025, and it is worth reporting because its public summary no longer prints a correlation for gold at all. Its gold section says plainly that "the relationship between gold and inflation is weak", and offers a different kind of count: "Of the 28 years in which inflation exceeded 3%, we find that gold returns were negative in 13 of them."⁵ The same page then makes the long-run point from the other side: since 1900, "the real USD gold price has risen 5.2-fold, an annualized return of 1.3%", and in "the 54 years post Bretton Woods", the system of fixed exchange rates that ended in the early 1970s (the summary gives no start year), real gold returns were higher, at 4.7% a year in the United States, 5.8% in the United Kingdom and 4.3% in Switzerland.⁵ The newer edition does not say which country's inflation the 28-year count uses, which years it covers, or whether "gold returns" there are before or after inflation; we quote it as printed. Weak year to year, ahead over a century: that is both findings of this piece in two sentences, from one source.

You can see what a loose link looks like in Figure 4, which we built from a different public series, year-end gold prices and US inflation from Aswath Damodaran's dataset at NYU Stern.³ Each dot is one year from 1972 to 2025. In 30 of those 54 years the gold price rose by more than that year's inflation; in 24 it did not. The dots lean upward to the right, which is the positive correlation. They also scatter all over the place, which is why 0.34 is not one. The two most recent high-inflation years make the point on their own: in 2021 and 2022, with US inflation of about seven percent and then about six and a half percent, the highest since 1981, the gold price fell in the first year and was close to flat in the second. In the three years after that, with inflation back near three percent, it rose by 13%, 26% and 66%. That is the horizon point arriving early: the answer depends on the window you draw.³

Two footnotes on that number, because they are the kind of thing this site exists for. The Yearbook's correlation is computed on spot gold data from the World Gold Council for 1972 to 2024, and the World Gold Council is the gold industry's own body.² That does not make the data wrong, but it is worth knowing where it comes from. And our Figure 4 uses a different series and a different end year, so it is an illustration of the same idea, not a reproduction of their calculation; the fine print says what we get when we run the same sum.

Finding two: over the horizons people invest for, it is unreliable

The second finding comes from Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey's 2013 paper The Golden Dilemma, which takes the popular arguments for gold one at a time and tests each against the data. Their summary line is blunt: gold "may be an effective hedge if the investment horizon is measured in centuries. Over practical investment horizons, gold is an unreliable inflation hedge".¹

How they get there is easy to follow. Instead of asking whether gold and inflation move together, they track the real price of gold: the gold price divided by the consumer price index. If gold kept pace with inflation exactly, that ratio would be flat. It isn't. Using the price of gold futures, which start in January 1975 when Americans were again allowed to own gold, the ratio began at 3.36, averaged about 3.2 over the whole period, fell as low as 1.46 in March 2001 and rose as high as 8.73 in January 1980. At the end of their data, in March 2012, it stood at 7.3.¹ A ratio that swings by a factor of six is not describing something that tracks the price of bread.

They then ask the question that matters for a saver: over ten-year stretches, did gold keep up? Their answer: trailing ten-year gold returns, before inflation, ran "from as low as -6% per annum to as high as +20% per annum", while ten-year inflation over the same stretch ranged only from 2.3% to 7.3% a year.¹ Put differently, over any given decade the gold price did far more of its own thing than inflation did. And for anyone who bought at the start of any ten-year window ending between 1988 and 2005, gold's real return over that decade was negative.¹ That is eighteen years of end dates in a row in which "gold keeps your purchasing power" was false for the decade just gone. Their 2025 paper carries the same ten-year measure through to March 2025 and sums it up without naming years: in the first twenty years of their sample of ten-year returns, which cannot begin until the first decade is over, gold "underperformed inflation", in the second twenty it "generally outperformed inflation".⁷ Same measure, opposite halves.

They also test the sharpest version of the claim, whether gold protects against unexpected inflation, the kind a hedge is really for. Across 1975 to 2011 they find "effectively no correlation here. Any observed positive relationship is driven by a single year, 1980."¹ Their conclusion: "We find little evidence that gold has been an effective hedge against unexpected inflation whether measured in the short term or the long term."¹

Figures 5 and 6 show the same picture on the public series we used above, year-end prices from 1971, the year the dollar's link to gold ended. Figure 5 plots the gold price and the US price level on the same log scale. Both go up. That is the direction finding. Figure 6 divides one by the other, which is Erb and Harvey's real price, and that line is anything but flat.

Why the horizon decides: 1980 to 2000 next to 2000 to 2011

The cleanest way to feel the second finding is to take two stretches of recent history and put them side by side. Both are measured from year-end to year-end on the Damodaran series, and the sums are ours.³

1980 to 2000. US consumer prices roughly doubled: up about 102% over the twenty years. The dollar gold price went from about $590 an ounce to about $274, a fall of about 53%. Put the two together and an ounce of gold bought about 77% less at the end of 2000 than at the end of 1980. Someone who bought gold at the end of 1980 to protect their savings from inflation, held it for twenty years, and then sold, had lost three-quarters of their purchasing power. Prices had risen the whole time. Gold had not followed.

2000 to 2011. Prices rose about 30% over eleven years, gentle by comparison. The gold price went from about $274 to about $1,575, up about 474%. In real terms an ounce bought about four and a half times what it had in 2000. Inflation was lower in this window than in the last one, and gold did far better. Figure 7 sets the two side by side.

Neither window is "the truth about gold". Both are cherry-picked, deliberately, to make one point: the answer to "did gold protect me from inflation?" depends almost entirely on when you started and when you stopped. Someone who bought at the end of 1980 had to wait until 2011, thirty-one years, before an ounce bought again what it had bought when they started.³ And that recovery did not hold: for most of 2013 to 2019 the real price sat below the 1980 level again. Someone who bought at the end of 2000, by contrast, looked like a genius within a decade.

Stretch the window further and the picture shifts again, which is the point. From the end of 1980 to the end of 2025, forty-five years, gold's purchasing power roughly doubled: about 1.5% a year in real terms, from one of the worst starting points in the series. From the end of 1971, before the big rise, an ounce buys about twelve and a half times what it did then.³ Long enough windows tend to come out positive; the trouble is that "long enough" has meant longer than most people's saving horizon, and the ride in between has been anything but steady. Erb and Harvey said it the careful way in 2013, on data ending in 2012: the absence of a clear trend in the real price "supports, but does not prove, the idea that gold's real rate of return might be on average close to zero".¹

They have since revisited that sentence themselves. In a 2024 follow-up, with twelve more years of data, they note that the flat real price was a feature of the 1975 to 2012 window: over that stretch "the real price did not exhibit a rising or a falling trend". Run the same trend line through 1975 to March 2024 and it "has almost doubled", from about 2.5 to about 5 on the ratio scale used above. The actual ratio in March 2024 was 7.3, well above that trend line and, as it happens, the same level as at the end of their 2013 data.⁶ What they keep is zero as the very-long-run frame, not as a measurement over these fifty years. Their 2025 paper puts it plainly: "gold's real return over the very long term is zero, even if it is quite volatile in the short term", where "the very long term" means the two thousand years since a Roman soldier's pay, an argument from an anecdote rather than a measured series. The same paper restates the practical-horizon point as a mismatch in volatility, the typical size of a year's move: in their figures about 2 for inflation and closer to 15 for gold, which "essentially guarantees that gold will be an unreliable inflation hedge over short time spans".⁷ The trend has moved with the data. The two lessons of this piece have not.

Why the two findings don't contradict each other

Now put the two side by side. The Yearbook says gold changes correlate with inflation at 0.34 since 1972. Erb and Harvey say gold is an unreliable inflation hedge over practical horizons. Both are correct, and both come from the same kind of data. They answer different questions.

• The correlation answers "do the yearly moves lean the same way?" It compares each period's gold move and inflation, year by year in our own sums, with their own averages, and asks how consistently the two sit on the same side. A modest positive number like 0.34 says the lean exists and is weak: plenty of years pull the other way. It says nothing about the level you reach after twenty of those years, because it never looks at where you started.
• The real-price finding answers "over my horizon, did an ounce keep buying the same?" It is measured over decades, and it counts size. A correlation of 0.34 is fully compatible with a twenty-year stretch in which prices doubled and gold halved, because the correlation is built from the year-to-year wiggles and the horizon result is built from where you end up.

Erb and Harvey also explain the "centuries" part, and it is less mystical than it sounds. Looking back to 1791, they find the real price of gold "was fairly constant until the 1970s". That was not because gold tracked inflation; it was because the dollar was defined in gold for most of that time and the price was fixed by government.¹ A fixed price cannot fail to look stable. Since the 1970s, with a free market price, the real price "has fluctuated wildly". They also cite the older work of Roy Jastram, who found gold a poor hedge over the next few years and a good one over roughly a century.¹ Nobody saves for a century.

One more caution, and it is the authors' own. A free market price for gold has only existed since the 1970s, so everything measured on it rests on what they call "arguably one historical episode", and they warn that "it is dangerous to draw inference about the future" from it.¹ Our 54 years in Figure 4 are that same episode. Every number on this page describes that period; none of them is a law.

What gold does show up doing in the research, briefly

None of this means gold is useless in a portfolio, and it would be unfair to leave that impression. The same paper looks at a different job people give gold: holding its value when stock markets fall. Erb and Harvey find that from 1975 to 2012, gold's monthly returns had a low correlation with US share returns, which is what makes it a diversifier, meaning it often moves differently from the rest of a portfolio. But in 17% of months both shares and gold fell together, which is why they conclude gold "may not be a reliable safe haven asset" during market stress, and note that, "depending upon how one defines a 'safe haven'", "a good portfolio diversifier may not be a 'safe haven' asset".¹

The same paper also looks at the extreme case people have in mind when they buy gold: runaway inflation. Their example is Brazil from 1980 to 2000, where an ounce of gold lost about 70% of its local purchasing power, roughly what a US holder lost over the same years, and yet was, in their words, "a great alternative" to cash under the mattress or Brazilian bonds paying a fixed nominal rate, which they estimate lost close to all of their real value.¹ Both halves of that sentence are the point: gold did not keep its purchasing power, and it still did far better than the local money.

That is a different claim from the inflation one, with its own evidence and its own weak spots, and it deserves to be checked on its own terms rather than settled in a paragraph here. We mention it so that "gold isn't a reliable inflation hedge" is not read as "gold does nothing".

How to read the next gold claim you see

The useful thing to take from all this is not a view on gold. It is a short list of questions that turn a slogan into something you can check:

• Which period? "Gold went up 470% while inflation was 30%" is true for 2000 to 2011. "Gold lost three-quarters of its purchasing power" is true for 1980 to 2000. A claim that names no start and end date has chosen them for you.
• Nominal or real? A record gold price in dollars is a nominal fact. Whether an ounce buys more than it did is a real one. The two can point opposite ways for years.
• Which currency, and whose inflation? Everything above is in US dollars against US prices, because that is what the research measures. A euro saver holds gold priced in dollars and shops in euros, so the exchange rate sits between them and the Dutch or European inflation figure is not the American one. We have not measured that gap here. Erb and Harvey did look at gold in eight countries' own currencies, and found that since 1975 the real price of gold in those countries "seems to have moved largely in tandem", with the change "largely independent of the change in currency values"; their answer to "Is gold a currency hedge?" is "It appears the answer is no."¹ So the gold story is broadly the same story in other currencies, but the exact numbers for a euro saver are not the ones on this page, and a claim made to you in euros should be able to show its own.
• Direction or reliability? If someone shows you a correlation, they are showing you direction. Ask to see the real price over the horizon you care about.
• What does it pay while you wait? Nothing, by construction. That is not a flaw in gold; it is what gold is. It just means all of the return has to come from the next buyer.

Sources

1. Erb, Claude B., and Campbell R. Harvey, "The Golden Dilemma," Financial Analysts Journal 69(4), 2013, pp. 10–42, doi:10.2469/faj.v69.n4.1. We read the free working-paper version, NBER Working Paper 18706 (January 2013): nber.org/papers/w18706, archived locally. Quotations and figures above are from that version: the abstract; the real-price ratios (Exhibit 2, p. 6); the unexpected-inflation result (Exhibit 3, p. 7); the ten-year return ranges and the 1988–2005 observation (Exhibit 4, pp. 8–9); the long-run real price (Exhibit 8, pp. 13–14); the safe-haven quadrant (Exhibit 14, p. 24); the conclusion (p. 44). The paper notes that at least one co-author disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance.
2. Dimson, Elroy, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2025: Public summary edition (UBS / London Business School, 2025; the document carries an approval date of 28 February 2025), section 9, "Gold and commodities can play a role in hedging inflation", p. 11. Publisher page: ubs.com … global-investment-returns-yearbook-2025; we retrieved the PDF via the Internet Archive and archived it locally. The gold data behind the correlation is described there as spot gold, 1972–2024, from the World Gold Council. The full Yearbook is a paid publication and we have not read it.
3. Damodaran, Aswath, Historical Returns on Stocks, Bonds and Bills: 1928–2025, dataset histretSP.xls, NYU Stern: pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pc/datasets/histretSP.xls, downloaded 2 September 2026 and archived locally. Used: the year-end gold price per ounce (sheet "Gold Prices", which cites the LBMA gold price from 1970 onward) and the annual US CPI inflation rate (sheet "Inflation Rate", FRED series CPIAUCNS). Every real value, window change and yearly tally in this piece is our own arithmetic on those two columns.
4. Buffett, Warren E., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. 2011 Annual Report, Chairman's Letter, pp. 18–19 in the letter's own page numbering (pdf pages 17–18): berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf, archived locally. Quoted as the view of a practitioner, not as a measurement.
5. Dimson, Elroy, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2026: Public summary edition (UBS / London Business School, 2026; data through end-2025; the PDF was created on 24 February 2026), section 6, "Gold as a hedge?", p. 10. Publisher URL: ubs.com/…/giry2026-summary-public.pdf; our own download attempts at the publisher failed, so we retrieved it via the Internet Archive (snapshot of 10 August 2026) and archived it locally. The gold prices behind its Figure 18 are credited to Finaeon, the inflation series to the DMS database. As with the 2025 edition, we have read the free summary only.
6. Erb, Claude B., and Campbell R. Harvey, "Is There Still a Golden Dilemma?", SSRN working paper 4807895, version of 7 May 2024: papers.ssrn.com … abstract_id=4807895, read in full and archived locally. A working paper, not a peer-reviewed article. Used: the trend statements on the real price of gold, 1975–2012 and 1975–March 2024 (p. 10, including footnote 8), and the March 2024 real price of 7.3 (p. 14). The "about 2.5 to about 5" figures are values on their fitted trend line, not observed prices.
7. Erb, Claude B., and Campbell R. Harvey, "Understanding Gold", SSRN working paper, version of 10 December 2025: papers.ssrn.com … abstract_id=5525138, read in full and archived locally. A working paper, not a peer-reviewed article. Used: the volatility comparison and the "short time spans" sentence (p. 5), the two-halves summary of their ten-year measure (p. 5, Exhibit 2, January 1975 to March 2025; the paper does not say which years the two halves cover) and the authors' own summary of their 2013 findings (p. 40). The 2 and 15 are their stated annualised volatilities in percent; the paper does not say over which period they were measured.

How we checked. Verified 2 and 3 September 2026 against the seven sources above, all opened and read by us. Every source carrying a number was read out twice by two readers working independently and unable to see each other's work, and the two readings were reconciled cell by cell against the documents. What is ours and what is theirs. The correlation of 0.34, the real-price ratios, the ten-year ranges, the 1988–2005 observation and the 17% figure are the authors' own numbers, quoted. The two windows, the "until 2011" statement, the 30-of-54 tally and Figures 4 to 7 are our own arithmetic on Damodaran's year-end series, and they are not the same data the two papers use: Erb and Harvey use monthly gold futures prices from Bloomberg and a GDP deflator for their two-century chart; the Yearbook uses World Gold Council spot prices to 2024. On our year-end series the year-by-year correlation between gold price changes and US inflation comes out at 0.41 for 1972–2025 and 0.45 for 1972–2024, higher than the Yearbook's 0.34; if we correlate gold's real return with inflation instead, we get 0.33 for 1972–2024, close to theirs. The Yearbook's sentence says "changes in the gold price" while the title of its chart says "real asset returns", so the 0.34 is most likely the real-return version; we quote the sentence as printed and flag the ambiguity here. The summary also does not say at what frequency the 0.34 is measured; we assume yearly, as our own sums are. Its "low long-run return" for gold also sits oddly next to the 2026 summary's real gold returns of 4.7%, 5.8% and 4.3% a year over "the 54 years post Bretton Woods", and the two editions use different gold series, so we do not try to reconcile them. Either way it is a small lesson in how far a correlation should be trusted to two decimals. Our real series also carries a half-year mismatch that Damodaran's own does too: year-end gold prices against inflation measured on annual averages. Two things to hold lightly. Damodaran's gold column is a single year-end price, so it misses within-year peaks: the January 1980 high that Erb and Harvey's ratio of 8.73 refers to is higher than our end-1980 figure. And the 1971 starting point in Figures 5 and 6 is the last year of a government-fixed price, so anything measured from there begins from an artificially low base, which flatters gold; that is why the piece leans on 1980 and 2000 as start points rather than 1971. Scope. This is a US-dollar, US-inflation picture, because that is what the research measures; we have not computed the euro version. Gold as a crisis hedge, gold as a return engine, how to buy gold and bitcoin-as-digital-gold are different claims and are not assessed here. Who has an interest. The Yearbook is sponsored by UBS, a wealth manager, and its gold series comes from the World Gold Council, an industry body; Berkshire Hathaway owns the productive businesses its letter prefers; Damodaran's dataset is free academic material; Erb and Harvey's paper carries a disclosure that at least one author had a financial relationship of potential relevance. We have no position in gold and sell nothing. Two editions of one Yearbook. The 0.34 comes from the 2025 summary, which is where this piece started; the 2026 summary, published early in 2026 (its file is dated 24 February 2026), drops the correlation for gold and describes the relationship as weak, and we report both rather than quietly swapping one for the other. The 2026 document carries an "Approval date" of 28 February 2025 in its disclaimer next to an expiry of 28 February 2026 and a 2026 copyright; we take the copyright and the file date as the edition's date and note the oddity here. Its gold series also changes provider, from the World Gold Council to Finaeon, so the two editions' gold numbers are not on one series. Two follow-up papers. Erb and Harvey's 2024 and 2025 papers (sources 6 and 7) are working papers that have not been through peer review, and SSRN refused our automated download attempts; the copies we read were downloaded by hand and archived. We take from them what they say about their own 2013 findings, the 2024 trend-line values and the March 2024 real price, the two-halves summary of their ten-year measure and the two volatility figures; neither paper reports a real return on gold over 1975 to 2024 or 2025, so this piece does not state one either. What this piece is not. It is an explainer, not a verdict on the claim "gold protects you from inflation"; that check is next in our queue and will point back here. Nothing on this page is investment advice. Think we got something wrong? Tell us at info@proofofreturns.com — we correct in public.