No it wasn't. It was that it was rare, and that it was pretty, and so rich people (the rulers) tended to buy it.

And then, promptly, they also repeatedly ran their economies into the ground by conquering and mining tons more gold, and inflating their currency into worthlessness.

And this happened over and over - the Spanish did it, the Chinese did it, the French did it. Every gold economy before the invention of actual economic thought destroyed itself with gold.