I've always like Warren Buffett
Buffett’s gold cube analogy
To get his point across about gold in that shareholder letter, Buffett imagined owning all of the world’s gold — at the time 170,000 metric tons — melded into a cube about 68 feet per side. “Picture it fitting comfortably into a baseball infield,” he wrote.
In 2011 prices (not far off today’s value) the brick would be worth $9.6 trillion. With that money, Buffett noted, you could have also owned all 400 million acres of U.S. cropland, the entirety of Exxon Mobil (at the time the world’s most profitable company, and a stock that pays a generous dividend) 16 times and still have $1 trillion left over.
If you’re wondering what you’d rather own for the long term, think of what you’d have decades down the line, Buffett suggested.
“A century from now, the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops — and will continue to produce that valuable bounty whatever the currency may be,” he wrote. “Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and remember you get 16 Exxons).”
Your gold cube, meanwhile, will simply continue to be a gold cube. The price of gold could be higher or lower a century from now. In the meantime, Buffett quipped, “you can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
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