In the A time travelers dilemma: where to store vintage documents for hundreds of years thread, the question was raised of having to pay e.g. a law firm for document storage and thus eating into potential profits. I was going to point out that inflation over the centuries means that fees were much cheaper back then; but then I realized that that’s only measured in the intangible medium of dollars or British pounds. If you had to come up with the actual specie to pay a fee in pounds Sterling in the Eighteenth century, maybe the inflation since then has been less dramatic? In other words, what does the inflation index look like when keyed to the price and buying power of silver or gold?
In this instance, wouldn’t gold just be another tradable commodity or currency, subject to the same purchasing power parity concerns as any other?
e.g. random sources:
https://www.goldpriceforecast.com/explanations/gold-purchasing-power/ and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and Gold Explained
Or some examples: Gold Price Tracking 100 Years: Comparing Gold and the Dollar
If the question were “If you were traveling back in time, would it be better to bring X$, or X$ worth of gold nuggets”… it would just depend on the market conditions of your departure vs your arrival timeline, comparing the purchase power of gold between those times.
There is the Big Mac Index formulated by The Economist magazine.
The Big Mac Index is a price index published since 1986 by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and providing a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. It “seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible.”[1] The index compares the relative price worldwide to purchase the Big Mac, the flagship hamburger sold at McDonald’s restaurants.