Cost of food steadily falling! (When priced in gold.)

[alecmuller]

I just came across a cool website that reminded me of a discussion here a few months back:
http://pricedingold.com
What do prices of food, crude oil, coffee, and other essentials look like over the last few decades when measured in real money?  This:





They have a lot of other charts as well.

The wage and disposable income charts are pretty depressing.  Per capita disposable income, for instance, is right about where it was at the end of WWII (having peaked twice at 4 times that much around 1970 and 2002.  Home prices are half what they were in the early 90's coming out of the S&L crisis.  The DOW is down to about 15% of its 1999 peak.

Lastly, for anyone who thinks $42/oz is way too much to pay for silver:


http://pricedingold.com

[Dave Ridley]

toward the end of the crisis food should rise against gold.    in zimbabwe around 2009...it took about 3 bucks worth of gold to buy a loaf of bread. measured in 2009 u.s. bucks.   That's a bit more than bread should cost.   

[alecmuller]

I think in that particular case, they had extremely bad breakdowns production and distribution, which would cause prices of essentials to spike.  Hopefully it will never get that bad here, but we have no way of knowing.

One thing to think about with these charts is that the vast majority of people aren't thinking in gold - they're still thinking in dollars, and they view gold as just another volatile commodity (if they think about it at all).  I'm sure even a good chunk of the people who do invest in gold plan on riding a bubble (like in 1980) and timing their exit.

Until it's very common for people to do their accounting and define contracts in gold grams, I doubt these charts will get any more stable.

[KBCraig]

I didn't watch the GOP debate, but I saw some highlights. Ron Paul pointed out that gasoline is a dime a gallon... if you use silver dimes.