Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Have I got my sums wrong - or right?

Bill Bonner, in The Daily Reckoning Australia yesterday, quotes Paul van Eeden as saying that gold has kept pace almost perfectly with inflation since the 1920s.

My post of 29 July did some figures with US gold stocks, the price of gold and the money supply, and came to an arresting conclusion. A kilo of gold costs x dollars, yet at that price, all US gold could be bought for 1/66th of all US dollars. There'd be a huge pile of spare paper money left over, completely unrelated to gold.

From one point of view, the current gold price is not surprising, if gold is merely one tiny part of the overall economy governed by the dollar system. Yet the ratio in the previous paragraph - 1:66, which is the same as 1.5 cents to 1 dollar - is almost exactly what The Mogambo Guru (Richard Daughty) said is the difference in purchasing power between one modern dollar and one 1913 dollar. According to him, the modern dollar is worth two 1913 cents.

Perhaps Doug Casey is right: if trust in the dollar collapses, gold could be "going to the moon".

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