Silver

Silver has been falling off a cliff for about 135 years at a minimum, having lost something like 70 to 75% of its value in gold. In comparison, the USD has lost about 97% of its value over the same period, but anyone thinking silver can function as a store of value will be sadly mistaken.

Bart, although your comment is a couple of years old, and you will likely never see this reply, I will respond for future visitors to this page. Silver IS a store of value, just like gold. Only difference is that silver's true value, that is it's value without price suppression which it has dealt with even more than gold through concentrated short positions by 2 US banks as a proxy for the "Federal" Reserve to protect the fiat dollar's perceived value, is much higher than gold. We will see silver priced higher than gold in the near future, although it will likely eventually come back to it's geologic ratio to gold of 17:1 in terms of price. Before end of 2010 we will see gold at or above $5000 and silver around $1000, at least temporarily.

Money of all sorts has three functions: to measure value, to transfer value, and to store value. Our present Federal Reserve Accounting Unit Dollars (F.R.A.U.D.) are quite good at the first two on any time-scale that matters. They are, however, absolutely miserable as a store of value.

Right now, silver is very clumsy as a measure of value. As always, it is an excellent means by which to transfer value, and for that purpose I actually like it better than gold. There was a reason the $1 and $3 gold pieces of the 1850s were generally considered to be a pain in the ass. Silver worked way better at that scale and you didn't have to panic if you sneezed.

So, silver is great for transferring value, but for measuring value it's not all that good. Historical data since 1300 AD show that it's also not particularly good at storing value, at least in relationship to gold, farmland, or hammers.

The problem with F.R.A.U.D. is only that they're a terrible store of value, for which we (and the Chinese) have numerous alternatives.

Gold and silver are each excellent ways to transfer value, but they're generally inadequate as a measure of current value. As a store of value, gold is vastly better. Silver is generally adequate for the task at normal human time-scales, but not across centuries.

Guess what? I hold all three … and own a good chunk of productive farmland as well.