Can you show me a Times, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, or NBC article, that's not an editorial, taking a pro-gold position? That's the mainstream. That's what the mostly-unsophisticated read and believe.

The genuinely unsophisticated have a negative net worth, and they're not holding gold. They haven't dug themselves out of the hole they got into during the housing bubble.

Do you know where we can find statistics of financial holdings by households in the USA? I'm sure it will show an increase in gold holdings, but the vast majority of people who have any savings at all have them in naive instruments like mutual funds. Even holding individual stocks is a level of sophistication that puts you above probably %80 of the population.

Holding gold is probably at the level of holding stocks in terms of sophistication right now... to do so you have to recognize the fundamental error in the worldview held by essentially the entire media-- and that takes a lot of thinking.

I do see a lot of people who aren't completely unsophisticated, but not very sophisticated who bash gold. These are the people who hold mutual funds and don't understand why paying %1 of your total assets to a mutual fund in order to underperform the market (which they think they're not doing because they have an "index" fund) is a bad idea, even after you try to explain it to them. ("Stocks are too risky, that's gambling" they say).

For the past 10 years, I've been seeing the same arguments, mostly ideological, against owning gold. I won't call these people unsophisticated, as it take some sophistication to understand why gold is a threat to their ideology.

> When average joes start piling in and blowing up the price, then gold may take leave of its fundamentals and we'll have a bubble.

> The genuinely unsophisticated have a negative net worth, and they're not holding gold.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if I take both of these seriously then it sounds as if your criterion for a bubble is that most of the money sunk into something comes from people with negative net worth. By that criterion, I'm not sure that there has ever been a bubble in anything.

(Maaaaaaybe houses in the recent property bubble, but (1) I very much doubt it and (2) in any case mortgages are rather a special case, in that for a long time lots of people have had large investments in property that were mostly leverage; I don't think anything comparable has ever been true for gold, shares, Dutch tulips, or anything else.)