Hello, welcome to the gold edition of Slate Money Swag, your guide to all things that don't cash flow and yet might also be considered

investments. I am Felix Salmon of Axios. I am joined this week by Justina Vasquez of Bloomberg.

How's it going? Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you here in Brooklyn. What is your job at Bloomberg?

I cover gold markets for Bloomberg.

Gold markets, silver, and kind of all of the precious metals. All things precious.

Indeed. Is it fun? It's fun. It's a lot of watching the macroeconomy and the incremental parts that

make people really afraid or really excited. So we are going to talk about gold as an investment, whether it makes sense as an investment,

how long it has been an investment, whether it is a money laundering tool, whether you should

buy physical gold itself, whether you should buy ETSs, which are a way of turning gold into

stocks, basically, and all manner of other sexy things.

The main thing I learned in this episode is that the most popular gold coin in Europe is called

The Philharmonic.

The Vienna Philharmonic.

How awesome is that?

If you want to buy a European coin, you can buy a Philharomonic coin. I mean, who can resist that? All coming up on slate money swag.

This is the bit which I've been waiting for because I feel like everything else we're talking about on this season, whether it's art or Bitcoin or wine, is this kind of new fangled, like,

oh, wow, this can be worth money and I can collect it. But gold is like millennia old. This has been

an investment for way longer than, you know, any country you can think of has even existed.

Totally.

So this is the one.

And I was talking to Nat Popper at the New York Times about this when we did the Bitcoin episode.

...