Buying a House with Gold: The More You Buy, the Cheaper It Gets — The Other Side of Soaring House Prices

Opening: Two Record Highs

News and everyday conversation keep circling back to the same refrain: gold is at a record high, house prices are at a record high.

In NT dollars, that's true. Gold went from $1,800 in 2021 to $3,442 in 2025; the median Taipei home went from 720,000 NT$ in 1971 to 28.23 million (yes, 40 times). It looks like every asset is in a frenzy.

But step back: the NT dollar and the US dollar are both fiat — paper promises a government can print without limit. We've noted before that money (fiat) isn't really an asset, because money is essentially a stack of IOUs — its value rests on the credit of the issuing country and the stability of that credit.

So let's step outside the frame. Our ancestors used gold as money for millennia. What if we use gold as the measuring stick instead? What happens when you buy a house with gold?

House Prices, Priced in Gold

It's hard to argue that gold isn't the most stable asset. Gold's stability rests on the fact that its value is essentially fixed. Chemical inertness, mining difficulty, rate of consumption, and humanity's enduring preference for precious metals — together these have kept gold's intrinsic value unchanged for millennia. That's why civilizations across history used gold as money and made it the "anchor of ultimate value."

So we divide US and Taiwan house prices by the stable gold price to get "how many ounces of gold a house is worth." This figure is closer to the house's own value, because it strips out the depreciation caused by printing money.

Region	Period	House price (fiat)	House price (gold)
US (median existing home)	1975→2025	39,275 → 415,400 USD (≈ ×10.6)	244 → 121 oz (-50%)
Taiwan (median Taipei home)	1971→2025	720K → 28.23M NT$ (≈ ×39.2)	439 → 263 oz (-40%)

Priced in gold, US homes lost half their value in 50 years, and Taipei homes lost 40%. Houses didn't get more expensive — they got cheaper.

The last five years (2021→2025) make it even clearer: with gold surging from $1,800 to $3,442, US and Taipei home prices fell about 43% in gold terms. Taipei prices still rose 21% in NT$, but they couldn't keep up with gold.

Surprised? On reflection, not really.

Broadly speaking, there's no reason "the value of land itself" should grow more valuable as time approaches the modern era. Land is finite — the Earth's surface doesn't grow. And humanity's housing needs, on the whole, don't grow much over time either (setting aside redevelopment, pollution, and other special cases). If anything, as building technology improves and transport advances, construction costs should fall — so the value of a house itself should slowly decline.

Economic theory says technological progress brings deflation.

Maybe the relentless rise in real-estate prices is partly an illusion?

The Key Question: Did House Prices Outrun CPI?

If houses are falling in gold terms while soaring in fiat terms, where does that gap come from?

Yes, you've already thought of the answer: inflation. But 40 times — Taipei homes rose 40 times in 50 years. CPI at 2–4% a year — does 50 years get you to 40 times? Don't worry, I've done the math: the answer is between 2.69× and 7.11×.

Wow — so where did the extra tens of times come from? Clearly the official CPI doesn't capture these gains. Intentionally or not, we can't know. But the fact stands: the money in your hand is depreciating "fast" at a pace beyond what you'd imagine.

Put "fiat-denominated house price gains" next to "cumulative official CPI":

Region	Period	Fiat house price gain	Cumulative CPI	House ÷ CPI	Gold price
US (1975→2025)	50 yr	≈ ×10.6 (+958%)	×6.0 (+500%)	≈ 1.77×	-50%
Taiwan (1971→2025)	50 yr	≈ ×39.2 (+3,820%)	×6.1 (+510%)	≈ 6.4×	-40%
US (2021→2025)	5 yr	+8.5%	+18.8%	≈ 0.91×	-43%
Taiwan (2021→2025)	5 yr	+21%	+9.6%	≈ 1.1×	-43%

Sources: House prices (NAR/Sinyi/Pingtung University index); CPI (US BLS 2025 annual average 321.9; Taiwan DGBAS 2021=100, 1971=17.94, 2025=109.6); gold (LBMA).

Separating the long run from the last five years, this table tells us two things:

Long run (50 years): US house prices rose 1.77× CPI, Taiwan a full 6.4×. House prices ran far ahead of official inflation — a large chunk of that rise is something the CPI never counted.

Last five years: Taiwan's house prices (+21%) still clearly outpace CPI (+9.6%), while US prices (+8.5%) trail CPI (+18.8%) — because US home prices peaked in 2022 and have fallen since, while Taiwan's kept climbing.

Setting aside the regulatory and environmental differences that drive the divergence between the two countries, the bottom line: if you buy a house with gold, houses get cheaper and cheaper.

Who Is Losing Value?

If we accept that gold is the most stable asset over millennia, its nature unchanged, then we must accept a corollary: gold's "big rises and falls" actually reflect changes in fiat — when gold rises, it's not that gold got more expensive, it's that the fiat currency is depreciating.

So back to the start: gold at a record high, house prices at a record high — is it assets rallying, or fiat depreciating?

The data favor the latter. Because once we price in gold, houses didn't get more expensive — they got cheaper. What this tells us: what's truly shrinking isn't the house, it's the fiat currency.

Our lives — everything is priced in fiat. For most of us, it's genuinely hard to escape the fiat frame and see asset value and price from a different angle. But with this comparison, narratives like "our money was all spent by the government" or "we're being exploited more and more" stop being mere emotional complaints and become facts backed by data.

That said, understanding this isn't a call to find someone to blame for our lives, or to wallow in resentment. As the saying goes, "true optimism isn't blind cheerfulness or escaping reality, but the courage to see the difficulty clearly and still choose to face it and move forward." Only by seeing the predicament we're in can we gain the capacity to change it.

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Author: Noah ｜ 資產百科專欄
Research & data: Emma (macro researcher), Vera (fact-check)