 Mark Thornton has a special offer for fans of minor issues. A free copy of Murray Rothbard's famous work, Anatomy of the State. This is a limited time offer, so act fast. Get yours today at Mises.org slash Issues Free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Every owner of stock loves to hear all-time record highs, or at least new highs in my stock. And this week we saw record housing prices in the United States and gold approaching a new all-time high. And of course, gold is a minor issue. It's a small part of the commodities market. Gold minor shares are an insignificant portion of the overall stock market, but it's something we've had several episodes on that topic here at the Minor Issues Podcast. Now, if we look at the all-time record high prices in stocks, most people have heard of Berkshire Hathaway built by Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. Their shares, the A shares, reached over half a million dollars at one point. And you've heard of four of the other top 10 all-time record high prices. Five of them you've probably never heard of. One all-time record high price was for General Motors at $700 a share, which it hit in the year 1916. And of course, those records are in some sense meaningless when you take into consideration stock splits, dividend payouts, buybacks, and the value of inflation. For example, that $700 a share General Motors stock in 1916, adjusted for inflation, should be worth multiples of tens of thousands of dollars, whereas today it sells for about $30 a share. So generally speaking, we shouldn't put too much stock or it's at least ambiguous when something hits a new high or an all-time high. Or even if that's a stock index like the Dow Jones industrial average hitting an all-time high. News organizations, this is a major cause for celebration, but we're not really sure what to make of it as investors or economists. For example, technical analysis of the stock market, what are we to make of new highs or all-time highs? Is that really a buy signal? Meaning that maybe new buyers are coming into the market, sellers have already sold, or that maybe there's a short seller squeeze. Very often technical analysis can't answer those types of questions. Fundamental analysis on the other hand, which tells us to buy low and sell high, all-time highs would be a recipe for selling your shares when in fact that might not be the right thing to do. So yes, all-time highs are unambiguously good for the owners of those shares, but all-time highs is not a complete green light to invest much more money to go all in on a particular stock or index. For example, housing prices hitting an all-time high, is that a sign of more things to come? Or is that a sign that that market is in a bubble or a squeeze, is creating high, high prices but might be leading us to a crash? Now, I would point out that in a minor sense, gold might be different with respect to this. Even though if gold does set an all-time high right now, well, you have to adjust for inflation and other considerations, but gold doesn't have earnings reports in the news. It doesn't have buybacks. It doesn't have dividends. It doesn't have takeovers or bankruptcies. In other words, there's not a lot of news items to bring that to investors' attention. In fact, I would say since 1971 when the United States was taken off of the gold standard, news about gold and reporting about gold has gone from a significant factor to almost a non-existent factor. I noticed that Bloomberg News, which used to report on the price of gold, every single news update does not do so. In the Wall Street Journal, the last article I read and reported upon here was really making fun of gold investors. So I would say that right now the general public is unaware about gold in general. It's unaware that gold was money in the United States and around the world for a very long time, really for the development of civilization, and that gold still is the reserve asset of central banks. So it's still very important, but it's very much under-reported. So indeed, we will have to see if gold hits an all-time high and what transpires after one.