The below chart shows how closely the value of gold (relative to the U.S. dollar) has tracked the enormous increase in money supply:Under the gold standard, a country needed to have enough physical gold to match its currency reserves, which limited the amount of new money its government could print, thus keeping inflation under control. Since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard five decades ago, money supply has exploded, resulting in a decline in the U.S. dollar's purchasing power of over 90%.Gold also ca ...