Translate

Friday 26 April 2013

All The Gold In The World

When I was a kid I thought that all the gold in the world, was a mountain in the vaults under the Bank of England .... 
 
Gold Finger Was A Big Gold Investor As Mr Bond Found Out
Gold Finger Was A Big Gold Investor

..... and then later after watching the James Bond movie 'Gold Finger', in the Vaults in Fort Knox USA.
 
However, I had never thought about how much gold was really in the world .... well others have and surprisingly there are many guesses as to the amount mined to-date. Of course gold has been mined for millennia, maybe for over 6,000 years, with the earliest known gold coins produced about 550 BC under King Croesus of Lydia (in Asia Minor), so that's a lot of gold. Of course gold is virtually indestructible, so almost all that gold is still about. That means that if you have a gold ring, some of the gold in that ring could well have been mined by the Romans 2,000 years ago, or been part of a Pharaohs throne.

However the use of gold in electronic devices such as mobile phones, means that for the first time ever gold is disappearing from the above ground stock because 12% of current world gold production, where it is used in such small quantities in each individual product, that it may no longer be economical to recycle it, and it ends up in landfills ... buried forever.

Investment advisers Thomson Reuters GFMS, produce an annual gold survey, which suggests that the amount lost so far is 171,300 tonnes - which is approximately 20.7m (68ft) on each side, and would reach to 9.8m above ground level.

However other estimates range from 155,244 tonnes, to the Gold Standard Institutes estimate of 2.5 million tonnes (approx about 16 times the smallest amount), and the largest estimate would fit in a cube with sides 50m (166ft) long - or a column of gold towering 143m above Wimbledon centre court.

Of course all the figures could be over or underestimates, for example in Tutankhamen's tomb the coffin was made from 1.5 tonnes of gold, so when you consider all the looted tombs for greater Pharaohs, there could have been hundreds of tonnes of gold buried in tombs in Egypt alone in ancient times .....

Gold Has Many Uses
Gold Has Many Uses .....

... well last word to that modern Midas, Warren Buffett, who has said that all the gold ever mined could fit into a cube with sides of just 20m (67ft) - he obviously takes the pragmatic line.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.

Followers

Blog Archive

Its a Pucking World

Its a Pucking World
Dreamberry Wine Cover

About Me

My photo
A middle aged orange male ... So 'un' PC it's not true....