Any Help Interpreting This Long Term Gold Chart?

I don't think the chart indicates an inflation-adjusted peak in dollars because I don't think the dollar is done inflating.

Over the past 5 years, the BRICS countries have been accumulating gold. If they succeed in moving to some kind of gold standard, fiat currency inflation will probably accelerate. India has already started selling sovereign gold bonds which trade only in India. If other countries in BRICS follow this, their central banks will need to boost reserves. I'm not sure that this gets them all the way to gold-backed currencies, but it will drain the world gold supply. It will most likely force inflation on the countries trading solely in fiat currencies. Going to metal backing, even partially, will force deleveraging of fiat currency debtor nations IMO.

I am curious whether the US and Canadian governments will start issuing gold bonds instead of just bullion coinage. One advantage is that bonds are safer to hold than coins, and are a stable store of value. The disadvantage is that it draws away buyers of fiat debt like Treasuries.

Issuing sovereign gold bonds is not the same as issuing a currency, but it has a similar effect. Over the last two years the Rupee has not inflated much vs the dollar, but the gold bonds haven't contributed much to that. Nevertheless, the Indian gold bond market appears to be about 3 billion USD right now, and tripled in size since last year. To support the bonds, India needs to buy gold. And they've kept it internal so that the gold doesn't leave the country. Dividends are paid in gold. It appears that the maturities are 8 years out, and current interest rate is 2.5%.

If all the nations could agree to set gold spot price at $1 trillion per ounce, then there might be enough gold to back everyone's currency LOL. There's speculation BRICS is trying to compete against the dollar and establish a currency partially backed by gold and other commodities, we'll see.

It seems obvious that we can't just arbitrarily assign a huge value to anything like gold, BTC or a newly minted trillion dollar unobtainium coin to get us out of this mess. It appears a forgone conclusion that we have arrived at a generally agreed upon standard of USD. I took a quick glance at some other currencies. Is there ANY currency that is not declining against USD? Doesn't that mean they are printing at a more profligate rate than US? When even one country can't take on USD how does that country and a motley crew of sketchy countries do it?

I find it impossible to interpret a gold chart when for most of the years the value was dictated by the government, and it was illegal to own.

The cost to build, operate, and decommission those plants is substantial. The fuels must also be mined, stored, transported, and safely disposed of once depleted. Nuclear is pretty good from a carbon emissions standpoint—acknowledging that you've converted a CO2 problem into a waste heat and spent fuel problem—but it's not a panacea from a cost standpoint. The same is true of people claiming that sunshine and wind are free. While that is true, the infrastructure and personnel to responsibly utilize the free input energy are decidedly not free, and to ignore those costs is a tad frivolous. Arguments of that form could also be made for rivers flowing and geology producing fossil fuels as free, and those arguments would be similarly impractical from a utilization standpoint.

To the original question, gold does vary over time. If you stripped out fiat inflation (and particularly inflation in excess of GDP growth), I think what would remain is a reasonable fingerprint of economic confidence over time. In turmoil, gold's value rises as a universally accepted store of wealth. In abundance, gold subsides as other commodities like oil, timber, industrial raw materials rise in value. When gold rises in tandem with those commodities, it seems reasonable that it would be die to monetary inflation, and when they fall in tandem, that would probably be in times of deleveraging, when the commodity value of cash rises sharply.

That is a lot of gold or not a lot of currency.