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Business and Economy, Capitalism and Greed, Central Banks, Distribution of wealth, Gold., The Future of Mankind
Just what is the value of Gold.?
Humans have been decorating themselves with gold since at least 4000 B.C.
According to a 2011 paper in the Journal Nature: meteor bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago brought 20 billion tons of a gold-and-precious-metal-rich space rock to Earth.
Tracing gold’s origin back even further takes us into deep space.
A 2013 study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that all of the gold in the universe was likely birthed during the collisions of dead stars known as neutron stars.
Where ever it came from here are some hard facts.
Gold, the 79th element on the Periodic Table of the Elements, one of the more recognizable of the bunch.
Two-thirds of the world’s gold use to be mined in South Africa. It is now ranked sixth amongst gold producing countries.
Seventy-eight percent of the world’s yearly supply of gold is used in jewelry. The rest goes to electronics and dental and medical uses.
- The atomic symbol of gold, Au, comes from the Latin word for gold, aurum.
- Astronaut helmets come equipped with a visor coated with a thin layer of gold. The gold blocks harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.
- The world’s largest gold crystal is the size of a golf ball and comes from Venezuela. The 7.7-ounce (217.78 grams) crystal is worth about $1.5 million.
- In Tutankhamen’s tomb alone they found that his coffin was made from 1.5 tonnes of gold.
- Earthquakes can create gold.
- The first purely gold coins were manufactured in the Asia Minor kingdom of Lydia in 560 B.C.
- You can eat gold.
- Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and is very non-reactive with air, water and most other substances, meaning it won’t corrode or tarnish.
- Gold nano particles are the only way some drug can work.
- Gold is in our every day language.
- If we emptied our bank vaults and jewelry boxes, we’d find no less than 2.5 million tonnes of gold in the world.
- The US Geological Surveyestimates there are 52,000 tonnes of minable gold still in the ground and more is likely to be discovered.
She’s been as good as gold. He or she is a gold mine of information.
All that glistens is not gold.
He or she has a heart of gold. Sitting on a goldmine. You’re worth your weight in gold. He or she scored some Columbian Gold. He or She is a “gold digger.” He or he has a heart of gold. Go for the gold. Tickets are like gold dust. Strike gold.
User-friendly software is worth its weight in gold.
From 3600 BC to the present day, from deep underground to outer space, gold has been a major factor in the world’s development and economy.
When thinking about the historical progress of technology, we consider the development of iron and copper-working as the greatest contributions to our species’ economic and cultural progress – but gold came first.
Its association with the gods, with immortality, and with wealth itself are common to many cultures throughout the world.
But how did gold come to be a commodity, a measurable unit of value?
Gold, measured out, became money. Gold gave rise to the concept of money itself: portable, private, and permanent.
Gold (and silver) in standardized coins came to replace barter arrangements. The concept of money, (i.e., gold and silver in standard weight and fineness coins) allowed the World’s economies to expand and prosper.
A lot of people think about gold as a percentage of a country’s total reserves.
Between January 2000 and March 2009, central banks reduced their reserve holdings of gold by more than 114 million troy ounces.
You might be surprised to learn that the United States has 70 percent of its reserves in gold. Today, the US has about 8,000 tons.
The Bank of England held 5,485 tonnes of customer gold at the end of February 2014, and 6,240 tonnes of customer gold at the end of February 2013. This meant that between the two-year end dates, end of February 2013 to end of February 2014, the amount of gold in custody at the Bank of England fell by 755 tonnes.
Now only 500,000 bars in the entire London vaults system,500,000 bars = 6,250 tonnes. Gordon Brown sold more than half of Britain’s precious gold bullion at the bottom of the market just before the price of gold started a decade of almost uninterrupted growth.
It was invested in foreign currency interest-bearing assets, 40% in dollars, 40% in euros and 20% in yen.
Meanwhile, China only has about 1 percent of its reserves in gold.
The reason is that a country’s reserves are a mixture of gold and hard currencies, and the currencies can be in bonds or other assets.
The United States doesn’t need other currencies. They print dollars, so why would we hold euros and yen? The U.S. doesn’t need them, so it makes sense that the country would have a very large percentage of its reserves in gold.
China, on the other hand, has greater need for other currencies.
In a money economy, however, you can say that the country’s gold holdings are the real money.
The IMF officially demonetized gold in 1975. The U.S. ended the convertibility of gold in 1971. Gold disappeared “officially” in stages in the mid-1970s. But the physical gold never went away.
Russia has one-eighth the gold of the United States.
Once China gets the right amount of gold, then the cap on gold’s price can come off. At that point, it doesn’t matter where gold goes because all the major countries will be in the same boat. As of right now, however, they’re not, so China has though to catch-up.
So one of my questions for central bankers is, if gold is such a ridiculous thing to have, why are we hanging onto it?
Gold serves as political chips on the world’s financial stage. It doesn’t mean that you automatically have a gold standard, but that the gold you have will give you a voice among major national players sitting at the table.
China feels extremely vulnerable to the dollar. If we devalue the dollar, that’s an enormous loss to them.
China is saying, in effect, “We’re not comfortable holding all these dollars unless we can have gold. it’s going to be a mad scramble to get gold.
China, along with India, leads the world in gold demand.
1999 – First Central Bank Gold Agreement.
The First Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) is agreed. 15 European central banks declare that gold will remain an important element of their reserves and collectively cap gold sales at 400 tonnes per year over next five years.
2004 – Launch of SPDR Gold Shares
The market is transformed by an innovative, secure and easy way to access the gold market. Seven years later SPDR exceeds $55bn in assets under management.
New York Gold Spot Price (24hrs)Oct 26, 2015 at 12:35 EST
| Gold Price Per Ounce | $ 1,168.54 | ∧ 2.09 |
| Gold Price Per Gram | $ 37.57 | ∧ 0.07 |
| Gold Price Per Kilo | $ 37,569.43 | ∧ 67.2 |
The annual worldwide production of gold is something like 50 million troy ounces per year. In other words, all of the gold produced worldwide in one year could just about fit in the average person’s living room!
That means that if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument.
When deciding on a gold jewelry item there are always many different terms that come up. The most popular are Solid Gold, Gold Filled, and Gold Plated. Solid gold is of course an exquisite piece of jewelry. Gold filled is the next level and is an amazing, quality alternative to solid gold. Gold plating is the lower level and these items tend to tarnish and can often times turn the skin green.
Pure gold is so soft, however, that it is rarely ever used to make jewelry. Most jewelry is made from a “gold alloy”.
24K gold is gold in its purest form without any other metal added (though even most 24K gold usually has minute traces of other metals in it. That’s why even fine gold bullion is labeled 99.999% Gold instead of 100% Gold).
Gold can be tested in several different ways. Acid Testing and X-Ray Fluorescence. They both have advantages and disadvantages.
Gold is an elemental metal. This means that pure gold is made up of nothing but gold atoms.
There’s just one problem with humanity’s continued love affair with gold: Getting it out of the ground. About 83 percent of the 2,700 tons of gold mined each year is extracted using a process called gold cyanidation, said Zhichang Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at Northwestern University in Illinois. This process uses cyanide to leach gold out of the rock that holds it. Unfortunately, cyanide is toxic, and the process is anything but environmentally friendly.
In 2013 a bloke named Liu and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature Communications that they’d stumbled upon a way to extract gold from ore with benign starch rather than toxic cyanide.
There is about $130 billion in gold in Fort Knox.
The entire stockpile now weighs 147.3 million troy ounces, which is worth about $130 billion at today’s prices.
The bad news is that the way we use gold is starting to change.
Up to now it has never gone away. It has always been recycled.
“All the gold that has been mined throughout history is still in existence in the above-ground stock. That means that if you have a gold watch, some of the gold in that watch could have been mined by the Romans 2,000 years ago.” The way gold is being used in the technology industry, however, is different. About 12% of current world gold production finds its way to this sector, where it is often used in such small quantities, in each individual product, that it may no longer be economical to recycle it.
In short, gold may be being “consumed” for the first time.
Platinum is even more scarce than gold. Only 3.6 million troy ounces are produced per year.
WE LEFT WITH THE QUESTION WHY DO CENTRAL BANKS HAVE GOLD BARS IN THE VAULT?
It did sweet fanny Adam to stop the financial crash.
It’s a holdover from the old Gold Standards. Gold standard regulation required all banks, including the central bank to hold gold as a regulatory asset.
In the last gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, the US in particular had to hold gold to back the dollar. The requirement went away with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973, but the gold didn’t.
These days there isn’t any requirement to hold gold. Gold on the Federal Reserve’s book isn’t even held at market prices, it’s marked to a notional statutory value of ~$42.
By the same token, there isn’t any requirement not to hold it.
“So why does anyone hold gold?”
It is expected to retain its value through cataclysmic events. The value of any currency, on the other hand, is dependent of the faith of the government or authority that backs it. The argument is that for some reason foreign markets become suddenly very adverse to take your currency, you should have some other medium of exchange that allow you to finance imports or serve short-term external debt.
All fiat currency is constantly competing with gold for value.
If everyone stopped creating money, and started hoarding gold, the central banks would, by definition be useless and powerless.
The trade-off between holding and selling the gold is different for “anyone” and countries.
Here a few Videos that are Gold.
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