There’s surprisingly little gold in the world. This infographic shows all the gold ever mined. If all the gold ever mined was melted into a solid cube, the cube with sides of 20.5m would fit in an Olympic-size swimming pool. One ton of gold is worth $64.3 million at $2,000 per ounce.
The small gold sphere in front of the couch weighs 1 metric ton exactly, with a value over $50 million dollars. The couch, which is made of $100 bills, is worth $46.7 million. The pickup truck can carry only 133 of the 400-ounce bullion gold bars, weighing a total of 1.66 tons and maxing out its suspension. The gold in the pickup would total $106.4 million.The semi truck holds $2.13 billion, which is the cost of a B2 bomber.
The Central Banks of western countries usually handle their nations’ large gold reserves. A couple of generations ago, the U.S. dollar was backed by gold, so the Fed had to hold gold. Today, the dollar is backed by the confidence in United States’ repayment of its debt (bonds). The Federal Reserve’s Chairman Ben Bernanke says that gold is only held as a tradition and that gold is not money.
There is a strong chance the value of the world’s gold reserves are inaccurate since the western world’s Central Banks have purportedly leased out the gold reserves while using accounting tricks to hide the facts, in order to push the gold price down. Gold price is an indirect indicator of economic stability: the lower the price, the more stable the global economy appears.
Developing countries have been buying significant amounts of gold in recent years, with India being No. 1 and China No. 2. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds 540,000 gold bars. Germany stores 45% of their gold with Federal Reserve. Germany and Switzerland are interested in getting the gold they store with the Fed back home.
A German court has recently demanded audit of Germany’s gold holdings, while the Central Bank of Germany has begun shipping 50 tonnes of gold per year back home.
Many other governments are engaging in gold hoarding, including China, which imported more gold in 2012 than all of the European Central Bank’s holdings.
See more at http://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/gold/gold.html.
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In the late ‘twenties the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht visited his good friend Henry Strong, President of the Federal Reserve and Strong invited him down into the cellars of the big Fed building to view the Fed’s store of Reichsbank gold holdings. Poor Strong was dreadfully embarrassed when the clerks failed to find it. Schacht laughed it off, saying he was sure the Fed was good for it.
It appears that the Germans are less confident of that today.