"When we took over Berkshire, gold was at twenty dollars and Berkshire was at fifteen — so, gold is now at sixteen hundred and Berkshire is at a hundred and twenty thousand. So, you can pick different starting periods. Obviously, if you pick anything that has gone up a lot ... in the last month or year, it will beat ninety ... or ninety-five percent of other investments. The one thing I would bet my life on, essentially, is over a fifty-year period not only will Berkshire do considerably better than gold, but common stocks as a group will do better than gold ... and, probably, farmland will do better than gold. ... If you own an ounce of gold now and ... you caress it over the next hundred years, you'll have an ounce of gold a hundred years from now. If you own a hundred acres of farmland, you'll also have a hundred acres of farmland a hundred years from now and you will have taken the crops for a hundred years and sold them — and, presumably, bought more farmland with the process. It's very hard for an unproductive investment to beat productive investments over any long period of time. ... I can say bonds are no good — and Ben Bernanke still smiles at me. ... If you say anything negative about gold, ... it arouses passions with people — which is kind of fascinating — because, usually, if you thought through something intellectually, it really shouldn't make much difference what people say."