"productive investments" - what does that even mean? When a business has cash on hand it needs to decide what it is going to do with it to produce the greatest return possible. It doesn't matter whether you put it in an appreciating asset (gold bar potentilla) or an employee salary, businesses are just looking to get the highest return on the cash they have left from operations.
> Buying and selling them doesn’t really consume significant resources it’s just a handoff,
Do you think Fort Knox is free to operate?
Compared to value stored it was. The base was already there, they built a small building, effectively reused military manpower, and stored almost 13,000 tons of gold. We are talking well under 1/1,000th the amount stored in expenses per year. At that point fluctuations in golds value are significantly more important than storage costs.
Consider in a more modern context how much security you put around an arbitrary amount of gold vs armed ICBM’s. Store them both in the same building and the gold is practically an afterthought.
Essentially a huge pool of unproductive assets like Artwork, Gold, Bitcoin, even Cash etc which seemingly hold a great deal of economic value, but fundamentally their economically irrelevant. Buying and selling them doesn’t really consume significant resources it’s just a handoff, every dollar going in is a dollar going out to either a middleman or a previous owner.