Any Help Interpreting This Long Term Gold Chart?

I find it impossible to interpret a gold chart when for most of the years the value was dictated by the government, and it was illegal to own.

The cost to build, operate, and decommission those plants is substantial. The fuels must also be mined, stored, transported, and safely disposed of once depleted. Nuclear is pretty good from a carbon emissions standpoint—acknowledging that you've converted a CO2 problem into a waste heat and spent fuel problem—but it's not a panacea from a cost standpoint. The same is true of people claiming that sunshine and wind are free. While that is true, the infrastructure and personnel to responsibly utilize the free input energy are decidedly not free, and to ignore those costs is a tad frivolous. Arguments of that form could also be made for rivers flowing and geology producing fossil fuels as free, and those arguments would be similarly impractical from a utilization standpoint.

To the original question, gold does vary over time. If you stripped out fiat inflation (and particularly inflation in excess of GDP growth), I think what would remain is a reasonable fingerprint of economic confidence over time. In turmoil, gold's value rises as a universally accepted store of wealth. In abundance, gold subsides as other commodities like oil, timber, industrial raw materials rise in value. When gold rises in tandem with those commodities, it seems reasonable that it would be die to monetary inflation, and when they fall in tandem, that would probably be in times of deleveraging, when the commodity value of cash rises sharply.

That is a lot of gold or not a lot of currency.

I think it could work as a domestic currency Brandmeister. But it BRICS really wants to compete internationally with the dollar and euro the gold backing would be drained out of their system quickly. France was doing that to the US in the late 1960's, demanding physical gold in payments. There wasn't enough gold to do that for very long. The Gold Standard only works when there isn't predatory behavior that tears the system apart.

India's domestic gold bonds back the Rupee to some extent, but the scale is tiny compared to Treasuries. Billions vs trillions. India is finding that building their gold reserve is expensive and time consuming. Their gold reserves are small compared to the US, China and Russia, and they aren't building them at $32 an ounce or by mining. Personally I like what they're doing to my holdings, but it's unlikely that they will succeed in their quest for gold-backed currency.

What hurts gold the most is that it can't be leveraged like fiat currencies. You can't create more of it out of nothing. A Gold bond or note has to be backed by gold, not by "full faith and credit".

Yep, exactly what it looks like to me.

Only problem is, I'm pretty happy with my holdings and that has never been a good sign.

Lol, you probably hit the nail on the head.

Scottsdale mint has a few good you tubes about all the commercial flights from London to the US carrying gold. APMEX also has some you tubes about the gold and silver as well. Something is going on with these metals as we might have an audit of Fort Knox and the London Metal exchange has moved deliveries for physical from 3 days to up to two months. I also see Walmart is now selling gold . Interesting times.