While precious metals, particularly gold, have been doing extremely well in these times of market turmoil, it severely lacks one key ability that allowed fiat currencies to take over, analyst David Lawant told RT’s Keiser Report.
“Gold has these amazing monetary characteristics that we’re all aware of with regards to fungibility, divisibility and scarcity,” Lawant of Bitwise Asset Management told Max Keiser. “But one thing that gold severely lacks is the ability to transport.”
This became a disadvantage for the yellow metal over time. People eventually started switching from gold bullion to gold receipts, facilitating a “fiat takeover” of the system, the analyst believes.
Notably, there were huge concerns about the lack of physical gold in the market when the Covid-19 pandemic started to spread across the globe, shutting down refiners and halting flights.
“I think that was a very important reason behind why the gold standard failed,” Lawant said.
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