No issue dealing with finance would be complete without some mention of gold. After all, the metal – chemical symbol AU – holds a special place in the popular imagination.

There’s the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Golden Rule. The Golden Gloves and Gold’s Gym. High-quality services are gold-plated. In the Olympics – as in so many other realms – gold is a symbol of excellence, wealth, and enduring value.

But in the realm of finance, gold doesn’t quite have the glow it once had. In his new book, The Power of Gold: The History of An Obsession, (John Wiley), economic historian Peter Bernstein describes how the metal has been an object of desire and medium of exchange from time immemorial.

Greek and Roman emperors stamped their visages onto gold coins. And because its beauty, durability, and rarity were universally recognized, gold made an excellent medium of exchange.

The search for gold fueled the discovery of the New World. But the august metal didn’t become the basis for a paper currency until the early 1700s, when the Bank of England began printing bank notes that could be redeemed for their face value in gold. Thus was born the gold standard.

In the 19th century, the gold standard spread throughout Europe. And once massive gold strikes in California and the Yukon increased the domestic supply, the U.S. officially joined the international gold standard in 1900. (That year, 20 bucks could buy a single ounce of gold.)

Amid the crisis years of the Depression, many nations dropped the gold standard. But the U.S. clung fiercely to the gold standard until 1971. Ironically, gold soared to prominence after it was dumped as a monetary standard. For in the 1970s, the onset of inflation made gold seem a comfortable haven. The price of gold quintupled from $100 per ounce in 1973 to $500 in 1979. And on January 21, 1980, in the dark days of stagflation, gold soared to an unthinkable $850 per ounce.

But as the economy stabilized, gold fell out of fashion as an investment. From its high point in 1980, the price of gold has fallen about 70% in real terms. Back in 1980, that $850 ounce of gold could buy one mythic share of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Today, that same imaginary share of the Dow, hovering near 10,000, is worth 41 ounces of gold!

Indeed, gold has become, in many ways, just another industrial metal – used for dental fillings and other prosaic uses.

But for all its decline, gold isn’t exactly cheap. And some of the old clichés about gold hold true. Any adult worth his or her weight in gold, for example, would still be a multimillionaire.

Daniel Gross is editor of Sternbusiness.