Imagine for a moment that you are a supervillain who took possession of all the gold in the world and decided to melt it into a huge cube. How big will it be?
Warren Buffet, one of the richest people in the world, once calculated that the "cube" would not be so big. Its sides will not exceed 20 meters - if we talk about the gold mined throughout history.
Even with modern technology, gold is still very difficult to find. To date, according to some estimates, 160,000 tons of gold have been mined. This is actually less than you think. If all the mined gold is melted into a golden cube, then it can easily fit into a tennis court, and even be 2 meters shorter. And this is all the gold of the world !!!
About 2,600 tons of gold are mined per year, that is, an increase in production of 1.6% per year. Thus, the newly mined gold increases the gold cube by 11 cm per year. Now such a hypothetical cube of all the gold in the world is 20.2 meters diagonally. Such a cube of world gold will completely cover the tennis court when 205,000 tons of gold are mined in the world. This should happen in 2025. 205,000 tons is the sum of the current gold reserves (approximately 160,000 tons) plus the known but not yet mined reserves of gold mining companies (approximately 45,000 tons). This is all the world's gold today - already mined and still in the ground.
Thomson Reuters GFMS informs investors about the world's gold reserves and updates this data every year. According to her latest calculations, it turns out that today we have 171,300 tons of this metal - just enough to be enough for Buffett's cube, even a little more. But not everyone agrees with the GFMS numbers. Estimates vary from 155,244 to 2.5 million tons. Why is there such a huge difference?
Historical shortage
This is partly due to the fact that gold has been mined for a very long time - more than 6 thousand years.
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The ancients knew a lot about yellow metal: Tutankhamun's golden sarcophagus weighed 110 kg.
The first gold coins were minted around 550 BC. by the Lydian king Croesus in the territory of modern Turkey. They quickly became a universal means of payment for goods and services in the Mediterranean region.
By 1492, at the time Columbus sailed to the shores of America, according to GFMS, 12,780 tons were mined in the world. However, the founder of Gold Money, James Turk, believes that this figure is grossly overstated, since the technique of gold mining was too primitive until the Middle Ages. From his point of view, at that time the mass of all mined gold was only 297 tons. Therefore, the final figure should be about 10% lower than the estimate of Thompson Reuters GFMS, that is, 155,244 tons.
Let's go far back in time. Now it is difficult to say when the first man turned his attention to gold. In those distant times, he could not have thought about how to use this material. In Egypt, gold was called "noob", it is believed that it was from him that the name of the country - "Nubia", in which the Egyptians mined gold, originated. The gold that they mined by the 7th century BC equal to about three thousand tons.
It has become the envy of its neighbors. And in 571 D. Sc. era was captured by the Assyrians. But after just fifty years, gold became part of Babylon. By this time, hundreds of tons of precious metal brought from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar had been collected in Babylon.
But Babylon also became in time the object of envy. At that time, almost two million people lived in it, the city was surrounded by triple impregnable walls, it would seem that nothing threatened it, but … The city was stormed and was taken by the troops of the Persian king Cyrus the Great. The next king (Darius) began to mint gold coins from this gold - dariki (8.4 g.). It is not difficult to guess that Persia too fell under the blows of Macedonia. All the gold and silver was loaded onto 5,000 camels and 10,000 carts! From Macedonia alone, Alexander the Great concentrated more than 5000 tons of gold. This is without counting gold from other countries in India and Central Asia!
Over time, all the wealth migrated to Rome. It was gold that contributed to the corruption of the "city of Rome and the world." During these times, as much gold was collected in Rome as had never been in free circulation throughout the world.
History repeats itself … The richer we become, the stronger the envy of our neighbors. Such a person by nature … One of the Vandal kings was able to take out 600 tons of gold from the destroyed Rome in the 5th century. Not forgetting to plunder all the Mediterranean countries along the way.
Historians cannot understand why the amount of gold in the world began to decrease after the fall of Constantinople in 1204. The next round is history with the discovery of the New World. In the early years of the discoveries, 900 kg of gold were brought to Spain. And then, over two hundred years, 2,600 tons of this metal was taken out of the New World.
Burma.
All these treasures that are listed here are not! Where are they? Not a single coin of Caesar, A. Macedonian and other no less significant kings has survived to us. Only those insignificant amounts of gold have survived to us that were stored in the graves of the pyramids or were lost due to disasters. For example, Pompeii died from a volcanic eruption.
Someone will say - it crumbled into powder and scattered around the world. But don't you think it's that simple? Everything here is more complicated … Let's go down to earth and see what happened in the next few times.
Rich placers of gold nuggets were found in 1814 by Brusnitsky in the Urals. Then deposits were found in Transbaikalia (now Transbaikal Territory) in the Amur region, on the Lena. Over a hundred years, these deposits have yielded more than 3,000 tons of gold for Russia until 1917.
By the beginning of World War II, the first crisis arose in the world; it did not affect only the United States. Since by this time the United States contained 21,800 tons of gold. At that time, the USSR had a stock of 2,600 tons. Do not forget that after the war we had to pay off our debt in favor of the United States in pure gold. It is not difficult to guess that all the gold in the world went to America. We paid off our debt, but England never returned us 440 tons of gold, which it owed us under the tsar.
Some of the investors are ready to believe in these calculations, but many analysts accept Turk's calculations with hostility, and one of them even remarked on this occasion that comparing Turk to GFMS is the same as seriously considering the Jedi religion on a par with Christianity.
However, there are those who are sure that both Turk and GFMS greatly underestimate the figures.
“The golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamun alone weighed more than 100 kg, and imagine how much gold there was in other tombs that were looted without leaving any records,” says Jen Scoils of the investment firm The Real Asset Company.
While James Turk only slightly tweaks the GFMS figures for gold mined after 1492, Scoils points out that even today, not all gold mining countries are willing to share accurate data. And in some parts of the world, illegal mining is flourishing without any official registration.
Scoils does not give specific numbers, but the independent Gold Standard Institute tried to do it for her.
His experts suggested that if we empty all the safe deposit boxes and jewelry boxes, we will find at least two and a half million tons of gold.
So who is right in this debate?
Will we have enough gold?
The truth is hidden behind seven seals, because in the end all calculations are based on assumptions that can be wrong.
We can only say with confidence that in the near future we are not threatened to be left without gold. According to the US Geological Survey, the volume of gold in the explored deposits alone is 52 thousand tons, but there are probably also unexplored ones.
However, there is also a reason for concern. Until now, gold has not disappeared anywhere, some products were simply melted into others.
“All the gold mined remains with us. If you are the lucky owner of a gold watch, chances are that it is at least partially made from gold mined by the Romans,”notes James Turk.
However, today gold is increasingly used in the electronics industry, and sometimes in such microscopic volumes that it is economically impractical to extract it from products that have served their life.
And this for the first time in history leads to irrecoverable loss of precious metal.