The big trend since 1971 is not growth. It is money.

What one unit invested in 1971 has become

Every series starts at 1 in January 1971. The logarithmic scale means the same slope is the same percentage growth, whatever the level. Gold and share prices track each other the whole way and both sit clearly above the money supply. Add reinvested dividends and the equity curve rises higher: it is the dividends, not the price gain, that have made the stock market the best investment over really long periods. But that takes 55 years of reinvesting without fees or tax. Section 6 shows what happens to that curve in reality.

How many ounces of gold does the stock market cost?

Take the currency out of the equation and price the market in gold instead of dollars, and most of the growth disappears. The Dow Jones cost 22.6 ounces of gold in January 1971. Today it costs 12.2 ounces. The peak was 42 ounces in August 1999, the trough 1.3 ounces in January 1980. The same picture holds for the S&P 500 and, from 1986, for the Stockholm exchange's OMXS30 measured in gold in kronor. The curves peak in 2000 and have fallen since, despite two decades of rising share prices.

The result depends on when you began

1971 is a favourable starting year for gold, because before that the price was fixed at 35 dollars. Anyone who bought gold at the 1980 peak waited 27 years to get back. So we show the whole picture: annual return up to today for every possible starting year. The reading is simple. For anyone who began in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, shares with dividends win. For starting years from 1997 to 2007, when expansionary monetary policy takes over, and again from 2018, gold wins in both dollars and kronor, even against total return. For 2008 to 2017 the S&P 500 with dividends wins narrowly.

How much money has been created

M2 is the broad measure of money: notes, coins, current accounts and bank deposits. In the US, M2 has grown from 633 billion dollars in January 1971 to 23,200 billion in July 2026, an increase of 6.7 percent a year, every year, for 55 years. Since the 2008 financial crisis it has tripled. The four large currency areas together, the US, the euro area, Japan and China, have gone from 13.8 to 102 trillion dollars since 1996. Gold's 8.9 percent a year since 1971 should be read against that background: it is not gold that has become more expensive, it is money that has become more plentiful.

Money parked at the central bank

Two accounts at the Fed show how the system has changed. The US Treasury's account (the Treasury General Account, TGA) held around 5 billion dollars in August 2008. In August 2026 it held 951 billion, with a peak of 1,817 billion in July 2020. The reverse repo facility (RRP) is where banks and money market funds park surplus liquidity overnight. It was close to zero before 2013, peaked at 2,554 billion in December 2022 and has drained since as the Fed shrank its balance sheet. Each of those amounts is larger than Sweden's entire GDP.

What is left after fees and tax

Total return indices assume every dividend is reinvested the same day, with no fee and no tax. An ordinary fund saver pays an annual fee and 30 percent tax on dividends. Here is the same comparison with a 1.0 percent annual fee and 30 percent dividend tax for shares, and a 0.3 percent annual fee for gold. Measured from January 1987, when OMXS30 starts. Capital gains tax on selling is the same for everyone and is not included. The conclusion is not that shares are bad. It is that the gap between the index curve and what the saver actually gets is large, and that gold does not carry that cost.

The new variable

Bitcoin has existed for 17 years, gold for 5,000. The series is short and the swings are large: the price has fallen by more than 70 percent four times. But the direction has been the same as gold's, only steeper. Measured in bitcoin, both the S&P 500 and gold have fallen by more than 99 percent since 2013. That says nothing about the future. It says that bitcoin has so far been the asset that responded most strongly to the same monetary policy that has driven gold.