Gold’s most-cited inflation-era performance comes from the 1970s. After the U.S. left the gold standard in 1971 (the ‘Nixon Shock’), gold’s price – previously fixed near $35 an ounce – was allowed to float freely, and it rose sharply through the decade’s high inflation, reaching several hundred dollars an ounce by 1980 before pulling back significantly in the years after.

That episode is real and well documented, but it’s one specific period, not a guarantee of how gold performs in every inflationary stretch. Gold has had extended periods of flat or declining prices even while inflation was positive, so ‘gold rises with inflation’ isn’t a reliable rule to plan around in every environment.

The more defensible takeaway: gold has periodically served as a store of value during specific high-inflation, high-uncertainty periods historically, which is the basis for using it as one piece of a diversified plan – not as a guaranteed inflation hedge on any given timeline.