From 1850 to 1971, gold returned (through its appreciation) an amount that roughly equaled the amount of money lost to inflation on average, though there were big variations around that average both across countries (e.g., Germany seeing large gold outperformance, while countries with only limited devaluations, like the US, saw gold prices not keep up with inflation) and across time (e.g., the 1930s currency devaluations and the World War II-era devaluations of money that were part of the formation of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1944).
