Time to invest in gold?

“If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion dollars…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.”

This seems like a pretty reasonable argument.

However, gold has been one of the most enduring investment options. As far back as 3500 BC, Egyptians were using gold for ornaments, statues and money.

There are plenty of investment experts who recommend some long-term strategic allocation to gold. If gold is such a bad investment why do people do it?