Yes, but this is an aberration, that can be easily taken care of by buying TIPS. Short tem instruments are not investments, gold is, short term instruments are "parking places" for funds until a decision on how to best invest them (or use them) is selected.
I also beg to disagree with Hamilton that the last dozen rate cuts were ineffective. Are they blind? We come from an overheated economy to an extremely mild recession and we are already sputtering a mild recovery. That is because of these "ineffective" rate cuts and flooding the system with both fiscal and monetary liquidity. The feds have successfully engineered a soft landing. Hamilton may not like it, Austrian economist despise this, but the fact of the matter is that the biter medicine of the bubble "should have been unemployment in the 10% plus range with GDP contraction lasting for at least 18 months and being much deeper than what we experienced. I did look at my last decade's expenses, my communication bill is a full 30% of what it was a decade ago and that includes broadband access to the internet which I could not dream off then. My "technology bill" is also 1/3 (I used to buy a new computer and a printer about every three years, in 1993, my cost was $700 for a printer and $2500 for a computer, last year I spent less than $1000 for both and the performance (I could not print in color then, now I have no choice <g>) I get out of this is 10 to 50 times greater. My food bill is possibly 10% higher not more (wheat is still selling at the same $3 or so it sold in 1980...). Yes, real estate and services have gone up more than the CPI on the average but claiming that we have a huge inflation is simply not true.
Last, the correlation is not really between "real interest rates" and gold, it is between inflation and gold. IMTO, gold as no "returns" on its own it is sterile, TIPS do have real returns, real estate does and even stocks in "good companies" do provide "real returns".
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