meeri

I agree, branding is a symptom rather than cause. Branding creates an image, a story of a better life. It provides for a need that people already have in themselves. Rather, consumer thinking should be looked at for the cause and why they find one story, image and brand more appealing than another.

As previous posters have argued, gold and silver can be better than holding your money in cash at a time of high inflation and low interest rates. Gold and silver are not 'investments' as such - they do not generate cash flows, like a business does through dividends or bonds do through interest payments. This is probably the reason why someone like Warren Buffett doesn't buy bullion. So if you decide to buy gold and silver you speculate that the price of bullion will increase, and the price of fiat currency will decrease in the future, which can be a perfectly valid thing to do. But you are foregoing the cash flows you could be earning at the same time from other investments, such as stocks.