That's simply untrue. There's been constant swings in valuation of around 20x recorded through the past 3000+ years (and decent evidence this also happened before that).
Pretty much all of recorded history is local govts trying to fix the price of gold to remove this instability, and in pretty much every case those govts had to abandoned the fix as actual market values caused local mints to implode.
There's ample research available on google scholar covering all of these points.
This is one of those things that people say as though it's a good thing, but since precious metals are a negative carry asset (ie it costs money to store and insure gold or silver) this means that when you take compounding into effect they have been responsible for a devastating destruction in wealth over that time. Even more so if you consider the opportunity cost of holding metals when you could be holding a productive asset.
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