Google’s parent company, Alphabet, hit a new milestone on Friday: a $2 trillion market cap.
Google is now the world’s fourth most valuable public company, right behind Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, which has a market cap of just over $3 trillion and overtook Apple earlier this year for first place.
The point is that if you’re doing anything besides direct bartering of physical goods, then you’re trading in something that has basically no actual inherent value. Paper bills, gold, whatever, doesn’t matter. The vast majority of its value comes from our mutual agreement that it has value as a trading device.
I keep trying to tell gold bugs who claim that gold has inherent value that you can’t eat it and it’s impractical for building a shelter, so no it doesn’t.