Yamana Gold Inc. (USA) (AUY), Goldcorp Inc. (USA) (GG), Newmont Mining Corp (NEM): Will You Be Buying Groceries With Gold Soon?

Sound OK so far? Well, here’s the problem: No one actually wanted these accounts.

What if they held a war against fiat currency, and nobody came?
Two years after Utah’s gold-bug law passed, the UGSD website still bears this message, front and center on the homepage:

The Depository is dedicated to restoring the option of ‘sound money’ to the people of Utah.

While we are not yet opening new accounts, we are connecting with our future customers now.

Discover what the Utah Gold & Silver Deposiory [sic] offers, and pre-enroll for an account today.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of between-the-lines reading to figure out what’s going on with Utah’s gold-coin law today. Two years after passage, the depository set up to put the law into practice is still trying to find someone — anyone — interested in taking advantage of it. Indeed, traffic to the site appears so light, and interest so little, that UGSD hasn’t even bothered to run a spell-check on its main page and catch that little typo up above!

Fooled by gold
And little wonder. Over the past year, gold prices are down by more than 10% already. And anyone who took up Utah’s generous offer in September, say, and made a deposit with UGSD then, would have found themselves 25% poorer by March.

That’s hardly the kind of monetary stability that Utah’s law seemed to promise. But it’s precisely the kind of volatility that Arizona’s law would have delivered, had the governor signed the law.

The article Will You Be Buying Groceries With Gold Soon? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Rich Smith and The Motley Fool have no position in any of the stocks mentioned.

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