hey, dummy, it's not that gold will be in a shortage situation, it's that $ wont buy it anymore. The entire world knows that we're counterfieiting $ and that we'll have to keep paying unemploymet, giving Bizs PPP loans and giving stimulus money to everyone else. They are unable to hold down the price of gold. It's going up over 2k per oz again by fall, without a doubt and it wont pull back much from that, either.
First off, my economic and investment knowledge is sophomore level at best, but if you
truly believe the above statement, yours is clearly Pre-K level. The US has done a LOT of stupid crap to the dollar in the last year. The biggest thing to remember is that most of the rest of the world has done pretty much the same thing to
their currencies in the last year as well, so the playing field is still fairly level across the board; at least in the grand scheme of things. Now, could it lead to inflation? Possibly. It could also lead to DEflation and a boom; there are actually valid indicators in both directions right now. Will it lead to higher taxes? Almost certainly.
But to address your core claim that a time is coming that "dollars won't buy gold", a simple question, When - as in "what year or month" - have dollars NOT been able to buy gold? You can't name one instance. Look at the chart above, that shows gold vs. dollars vs. stocks vs. bonds vs. REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts, which are basically mutual funds of real estate; a bundling of real estate instead of a bundling of stocks). Gold and the CPI (ie, inflation) have basically been bed-buddies since we functionally left the gold standard 50 years ago. And EVERYTHING else - including crappy, boring bonds - has surpassed gold for true value held long term.
This chart going all the way back to 1925 may help illustrate the difference between "dollar", "inflation", and the price of gold. And notice that the chart is logarithmic, not linear. Eg, going up two lines isn't twice as much growth as going up one line; it's a HUNDRED times the growth.
The gold line mostly hovers right at the starting point - the "$1" line, all the way to the early 70's. This makes complete sense, since in 1971 we left the gold standard. (Technically we left it in 1933, but the govt held the price steady at $35 per oz until 1971, at which point the 'volatility' started. Thing is, even with the "volatility" of the gold price over the intervening 50years, it's still stayed darn close to $1 origin line, at least relative to the dollar and relative to other investments. Simply put, it's stayed closer to the value of inflation-adjusted dollars than stocks have, than bonds have, and than a non-inflation-adjusted dollar has. The only thing that has stayed closer to the "zero-sum" origin line has been Treasury Bills. (Simplistically put, T-Bills are best thought of as shorter-term govt bonds; often used as inflation-protected places to temporarily park money. There are other differences, but that's the primary one.)
You can see from this
96-year chart, that gold has indeed done slightly better than inflation. But it hasn't done even as well as bonds (which are very safe and low returners). In 96 years, gold has grown by approximately six fold (again, compared to inflation-adjusted dollars), which sounds good, but only on the surface and only if we're completely ignorant of other long-term things. Even the extremely safe, very poor-performing bond market has nearly doubled that. And the market as a whole (which can be analoged via index funds) has returned around seven HUNDRED fold in the same time frame. And bear in mind that when they say 'large stocks', they're talking about large-cap stocks, which are about the most boring and lower-end-yield of the market. The line for the market as a whole would be an even higher performer than the 'large stock' line; which is still the best-performing item of anything shown.
So if you had bought $2500 worth of gold in 1925, you'd have roughly $15,000 today. That same $2500 in the stock market (spread around as evenly as possible) would now be more $1.75 MILLION dollars. With what logic, with a century-long track record like this, would a person choose the $15k performer over the $1,750K performer..?
And also notice that even in the "horrible" crash times like the "Great Depression" of the 30's, gold
still only beat the stock market for twenty-some months; never longer than that.
Again, to go to your core claim, please name one time - ONE TIME - when dollars couldn't by gold?