On Monday our venerable and esteemed columnist Dryblower surveyed all the commodity bubbles, and views thereupon, and concluded that gold should get a four-bubble (out of a possible five) rating.

This judgement, one hastens to add, was based on a survey of presumably informed opinion.

The other qualification was that this did not necessarily mean that gold wouldn’t go much higher (i.e the bubble would inflate even more) before the yellow metal went to hell in a hand-basket.

Now Outcrop doesn’t want to get into a “let’s take this outside and settle it for once and for all” type of dispute with a fellow columnist, but to take issue more in the style of a discussion in a quiet corner of a gentleman’s club over a few single malts.

Dryblower is assuming gold is a commodity. No, it’s money – unless, that is, Obama and the rest of the inflators decide to send the printing presses to the scrapyard and live within their means.

As Nelson Bunker Hunt said: “Almost anything is better than paper money … any fool can run a printing press”. (Okay, he got it wrong on that silver thing, but he was a few decades ahead of his time.)

But, gold – even if it were a commodity – is not all that bubbly. Take the just ended September quarter.

According to the latest ABN AMRO/Virtual Metals monthly report, gold was only in 35th place in terms of commodity price increases, with a gain of about 10%. Wheat prices were up more than 40% in the three months, as were sugar prices – and tin prices.

Corn, lead, coffee, palladium, copper, milk, soybean oil, palm oil, uranium, West Texas crude, pork bellies, rough rice – all of these left gold swallowing their dust.

In fact, of all the traded metals, only cobalt and rhodium did worse than gold (and silver was up around 20%).

But let’s get off this side road, and talk about the main issue.

Ben Bernanke and his sidekicks are about to hit the printing presses again, throwing another $US1 trillion into the liquidity pond. Let’s just mention credit default swaps, arbitraging and securitisation to remind us all that this is a financial house of cards.

All this money printing and debt must at some stage blow up. The whole financial merry-go-round is built on a never-ending flow of new money.

Now we have another little headache-in-waiting: America inflating, Europe (potentially) deflating if they start taking this austerity business seriously, as the British appear to be doing, and China being Malcolm in the Middle.

Who knows what is going to happen when the tectonic plates of the global economy start moving in opposite directions.

But, in the meantime, people are going to want hard assets, and debt-free ones at that. The plan to start exchange-traded funds for the various base metals is testimony to that.

But an economic dislocation has the potential to hit base metals, because their value is all about demand from processors and manufacturers.

Gold is different. You wouldn’t put pork bellies, zinc or live cattle in a safety deposit box. But people do put gold in the bank – that’s why it is different.

And, in fact, gold has a role in deflation, too. The best example of that, as we have pointed out here before, is that Homestake Mining saw its shares rise each year between 1929 and 1935 and so, too, its dividends to shareholders.

Gold only gets a kick in the pants when you have a wise economic policy built on stability and avoidance of debt (yeah, that happens a lot) or through the actions of politicians (don’t get the gold bugs started on Richard Nixon de-linking the greenback from gold).

Warwick Grigor at BGF Equities has been talking up gold for months now.

Two weeks ago he told clients: “Up until now there has been ample discussion about whether or not this has been a bubble … While this has been going on, the gold hoarders have been tucking away gold at each pull-back point”

“Those same people who have been talking about a gold bubble, trying to talk it down, are starting to realise that they have called this one wrongly,” he continued.

He sees more speculators jumping in, taking over from the hoarders, and introducing greater volatility – and then you will see the gold price accelerating.

Outcrop is singing from the same songbook.

In fact, forget the September quarter. Gold’s price has been building up only gradually since 2001. Sure, there have been a few dramatic spikes (and falls) but the trend line is not all that sharp in its climb.

That doesn’t look like bubble territory to me.

Maybe one day paper money will regain value rather than losing it. Until then, and don’t hold your breath, gold is going to be the money of last resort.

Footnote: next week’s Outcrop will expose one of the great misunderstandings about gold and the Great Depression.