Gold: The Ultimate Asset or Party Pooper? – Part I

The 12 Temptations blog is an ongoing series examining how markets behave under stress. We deliberately avoid prediction and advocacy, focusing instead on structure, incentives, and behavioural dynamics.

Back in the 1990s, I attended a small private function hosted by a good friend. One of the other guests was a senior bond trader at a large international bank. The kind who spoke easily, confidently, and without much need to elaborate.

At some point during the usual polite circling, he asked what I did for a living. I explained that I worked for a bullion trading house, managing relationships with gold mining companies. At the time, gold prices hovered around three hundred dollars an ounce, and hedging was still very much in fashion. 

He paused briefly, then replied: “How boring.”

That was the end of the conversation.

At the time, I took it as little more than social clumsiness. With hindsight, it feels more revealing. That brief dismissal reflected a view still widely held today - that gold is a curiosity at best, a relic at worst. The proverbial “pet rock.” Something inert. Something primitive. Something modern finance has moved beyond. And yet gold refuses to disappear.

It does not behave like a single asset class. It does not fit neatly into one discipline. It shows up in moments of fear and excess, faith and vanity, policy failure and human emotion. It is a commodity, a currency, a cultural artefact, a store of value, a symbol of power, and a mirror held up to trust itself.

If copper has a PhD in economics, gold owns the university.

Which raises an awkward question: What if gold isn’t boring at all - and what we’re really uncomfortable with is what it reveals?

The Casual Dismissal

The phrase “how boring” deserves more attention than it usually gets.

It wasn’t an argument. It wasn’t even a judgment about gold itself. It was a social signal; brief, confident, and final. A way of closing a topic without engaging it. In finance, that kind of dismissal often masquerades as sophistication. But gold didn’t fail the conversation. It failed the status test.

Modern finance tends to reward assets that can be described quickly and slotted cleanly into a framework. Bonds generate yield. Equities grow earnings. Currencies trade relative value. Each comes with a language, a toolkit, and a tribe. Fluency in those languages confers status. Gold complicates that order.

It does not produce cash flow. It has no issuer. It offers no guidance, no forecasts, no quarterly calls. It cannot be “improved” by clever structuring or narrative spin. It simply exists; stubbornly, across centuries, political systems, and monetary regimes, and for a system built on optimisation, leverage, and intellectual hierarchy, that kind of persistence can feel almost insulting.

Dismissing gold as boring is not a neutral act. It is a declaration that what cannot be neatly modelled is not worth serious attention. That complexity is a flaw rather than a feature. That ambiguity belongs to the past.

Yet history suggests the opposite. Assets that sit cleanly within models tend to fail together. Assets that resist categorisation tend to reappear precisely when the models stop working.

The casual dismissal of gold, then, tells us less about the metal than about the mindset behind it. It reveals a preference for elegance over resilience, for explanation over endurance. It reflects a deeper temptation to confuse intellectual comfort with insight. And that is where this Inquiry truly begins.

The coming series of articles do not attempt to defend gold, promote it, or rescue its reputation. Instead, we ask why an asset that refuses to stay in one category continues to provoke such casual dismissal, and what that says about the way modern finance prefers to organise knowledge, risk, and authority.

To understand gold requires stepping outside a single discipline. It means moving between economics and history, markets and culture, policy and psychology, and noticing where the boundaries begin to fray.

That journey is less about the metal itself than about the stories we tell to make complex systems feel manageable. Gold has a way of revealing where those stories strain under their own certainty.