Gold, as those who have been pushing its price to record highs well know, is less wired into the wider economy than other potential investments. That’s why it appeals to rich, pessimistic stockpilers and jumpy central bankers. When some great collapse strikes our fragile interconnected world, and your bank accounts and tech stocks are just flickers on a dying iPhone, gold will endure. Hoarding it promises a safe haven in a dangerous world.
Or so it seems. But there are risks, too, in betting against the future. What looks like a haven may turn out to be a trap. In myth and literature, hoarding gold is consistently punished, in brutal, psychologically instructive ways.
Sometimes, your gold is simply stolen, as in Aesop’s fable. A miser (sorry, high net worth individual) excavates his treasure daily, counts it, and reburies it. When it’s taken, he’s distraught. But a passer-by throws a stone in the hole, telling him that, given he was never going to spend his gold, the stone will be worth just as much. And theft can bring salvation: in George Eliot’s 1861 novel Silas Marner, the miser is a wronged man who has soured on the world — until his hard-won hoard is stolen. In its place, a golden-haired child arrives, and rescues him from his misanthropy.
Not losing your gold is at least as likely to ruin your life. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Midas ends up begging to be relieved of his famous, foolish wish. In an Icelandic saga, a chieftain robs a dragon lying jealously atop its hoard of gold — only, as historian Daniel Ogden points out, to be transformed into a dragon himself. In his 1923 poem “The Hoard”, JRR Tolkien shows how a single stash of gold and silver passes from dwarf to dragon to warrior. Each kills the previous owner, only to find that his prize consumes his life. The man totting up his gold takes no account of his own mortality. What makes Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge stand out is that he is forced to confront what his financial gain has cost, and can choose to change before it’s too late.
So throughout these stories, gold presents a moral test. In “The Faerie Queene” (1590), Edmund Spenser confronts a miser with our basic dilemma. His beloved, eager to run off with another man, sets fire to his “mucky pelf” — his filthy lucre. He is forced to choose between wife and wealth. He opts to keep his money, which is “dearest to his dunghill mind”.
These stories insist that if you try too hard to remove risk from your life, you remove all that gives life value: the things you could have done, the relationships with other mortals that could have enriched you. They warn that hoarding is not just caution. It’s caution curdled by a lack of empathy. For central banks, buying gold may make strategic sense, but these tales remind us that stockpiled gold exudes a certain way of looking at the world, and with it, a certain kind of politics.
Victorian orthodoxy insisted, Scrooge-like, that sterling be fixed to the value of gold, rooting it in a finite substance, preventing the urge to print too much currency. After the first world war, when the gold standard had been suspended to help fund military expenses, this was sharply reasserted; Britain returned to gold in 1925. The fear was that without this stricture the pound might plummet, sending inflation soaring. That meant leaving a million people unemployed, but it was seen as a price worth paying. Even when the jobless total reached towards 3mn early in 1931, the powers that be strove to balance the books and reassure the markets, keeping interest rates painfully high. Caution trumped empathy.
But then along came John Maynard Keynes, who had opposed the return to gold and now declared the orthodoxy discredited. It was intolerable to prioritise the gold standard over human beings — and it wasn’t working. People were over-saving; the route to recovery, he argued, was lowering interest rates and stimulating the economy. It was worth taking risks to coax savers to invest or spend, thus generating jobs and rescuing the unemployed.
This dispute rested partly on differing views of the nature of money. In 1912, the banker JP Morgan had insisted that “gold is money”. But what if its value sprang not from the natural world but — as Aesop intimated — from the human mind? In this fight, one of Keynes’s weapons lay in thinking about the economy in psychological terms. He challenged the Victorian fear of the future, the repressive inability to enjoy the present — with some help from Sigmund Freud.
In A Treatise on Money (1930), Keynes coyly observed that “Dr Freud relates that there are peculiar reasons deep in our subconsciousness why gold in particular should satisfy strong instincts and serve as a symbol”. As Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky points out, a footnote directed the curious reader to a Freud essay from 1908, which suggested that parsimoniousness was rooted in an infantile putting-off of the pleasure of defecating. Freud was drawing on analysis of his own patients, but on culture too: “[I]n myth, fairy-tale and superstition,” he wrote, “ . . . money comes into the closest relation with excrement.” (Think of Spenser’s miser with his dirty money and “dunghill mind”.) By this logic, the uptight mandarins of the Treasury and the Bank of England were so keen to hoard bullion and stick to the gold standard because . . . they were anally fixated.
This wasn’t just high-end trolling. Keynes was pointing up the same paradox as those old miser myths: that excessive caution was a self-defeating failure of imagination. Why cling to something inert when you could be creative? Finally, in September 1931, the pound was forced off the gold standard — and interest rates fell, lifting the economy. Which proved Keynes’s point, even if it didn’t prove Freud’s. In 1933, in his push to revive the US economy, President Roosevelt chose to take the dollar off gold too, and even issued an executive order banning gold hoarding.
Some Americans, however, never quite got over the end of the gold standard: they feared it risked rendering their national currency worthless. This has driven conspiracy theories — and hoarding — ever since. In 2015, months after descending his golden escalator to launch his run for president, Donald Trump mused that restoring the gold standard, though difficult, would be “wonderful”.
Some conspiracists went further, believing the end of the gold standard was a plot to leave the US bankrupt, forcing it to run up foreign debt, and so to fleece ordinary people. In the 1990s, these tales flourished; to some debt-burdened farmers facing foreclosure, for example, such stories felt all too plausible. Owning your own gold, it seemed, was the escape route. In 1995, a gold distributor was reported to be sponsoring the radio show of a militiaman who talked of hanging politicians as traitors. Elsewhere on far-right talk radio, you could hear men who were still furious with Roosevelt.
This worldview is lampooned in the sitcom Parks and Recreation via Ron Swanson, a local government official so paranoid that he not only hoards gold, he has “decoy gold”. But the fearful anti-state hostility expressed through this obsession can be very unfunny indeed. In 1995, a group of “freemen” were arrested in Montana en route to kidnap and “try” a judge. In their car, along with guns, cuffs and a video camera, police found at least $50,000 in gold and silver coins.
More recently, fears of a coming collapse have driven an ever greater number of Americans to prepare for the worst — more than 20mn of them, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Last year, CNBC reported that gold bars were “an increasingly popular staple” with the “doomsday preppers”. Since 2023, Costco has done a roaring trade in one-ounce gold bars. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who doubtless doesn’t shop at Costco, is a prepper. In 2016 he assured the New Yorker: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries . . . ” One critic suggested this turn to gold was driven by nostalgia for a simpler, more secure, more authoritarian past. What, after all, is “Make America Great Again” but a yearning for a golden age?
Some preppers stock up on cryptocurrencies too. But news of Trump’s tariffs sent their values tumbling. Perhaps real gold feels more reassuring than a picture of a gold coin with a “B” on it. The question, however, is whether any of this will help if the catastrophe arrives. When you’re fighting over a dead squirrel with a knife made out of an iPhone, JP Morgan’s claim that gold is money may not hold. Salvation through hoarding has its limits. As Scrooge or Silas Marner might advise, a more generous approach to your fellow human beings may prove more effective. Even if the collapse never happens.
Phil Tinline is the author of ‘The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares’. His next book, ‘Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy’, is out in March
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