Quote from peilthetraveler:
Most of the gold today has been mined in the last 100 years. For instance...Look at england in 1800-1850 A.D. when they practically ruled the world. They generally had between 50 to 100 metric tons TOTAL gold reserves. (In 1825 it was down to 9 metric tons at one point). The worlds largest gold producer before the gold rush of 1848 was Russia which produced 17 metric tons annually. King Soloman produced about the same annual gold 3000 years ago. It was very labor intensive to mine for gold and if you take the historical numbers you will see that even over 3,000 years (assuming there was ALWAYS someone mining at least that amount of gold annually, and you only get about 50k tons by then. There is no evidence that anyone used gold more than 5,000 years ago, so even assuming they started mining 5,000 years ago, and you still only have about 85k tons of gold. Now you want to believe that some family in china had more gold by 1934 than the world could produce in 50,000 years? Sorry, I dont buy it.
You have completely failed to even mention all the gold panned out of streams in North America, including the Black Hills and Alaska, between 1850 and 1900. Gold panners are rascally characters who don't necessary declare how much gold they have found, so we have to measure it by how many Levi's were sold during those years. Each pair of Levi's, before it wore out, could deliver 1000 troy ounces of gold. Levi was able to produce as many as 50,000 pairs of Levi's per year in those days, which means...which means...uh...er...ok just forget about that.
So are you saying that if you were the Judge in the KEENAN CASE that's been recently filed in a New York District Court, the first thing you'd do is break out your TI-83 calculator, punch in some numbers, and then dismiss the case?
Let's go with your figures of 165,000 total metric tons of gold. And, at $35 dollars a troy ounce, a trillion dollars buys you 888,000 metric tons of gold. That appears to be a problem. There's only one little problem with your little theory. The issuance of such bonds...their relation to the price that gold was declared to BE in 1934, either by the open market or by decree...may not even be close. So, while the average joe in the US was given $35 a troy ounce to turn in the gold demanded, that's probably not how you could treat the kings of the world. It appears to me that the kings of the world were offered $35,000 per troy ounce, to consolidate their gold into a pool, to be regulated by a different set of rules (think: Bretton Woods). The average joe would not be told about this pool, and so, would never understand why the kings of the world REMAIN the kings of the world...without challenge. I'm talking about a "black" market, among kings, whose certificates of deposit (bonds) only make sense relative to that market. It appears that these kings have been given, initially, a 1000:1 leverage over the average joe. One reason you may not know about it is because for this to work for the kings, the kings must be silent.
To lend traction to this argument, i would point out the Federal Reserve's recent bailout of some of their bank buddies (think: the kings of the world)(think: 10:1 leverage of the average joe). Depending on who writes the article, the Fed issued
8 Trillion,
13 Trillion, or
29 Trillion dollars in bank bailouts...over and beyond other (the other two) bailouts that the public was aware of.
So, using today's price of gold as a gauge - $1780 troy ounce - and using the most conservative estimate - 8 Trillion - what % of the world's total mined gold - 165K tons - was recently loaned to a short list of banks? My calculations indicate this is 85% of the total gold ever mined from the earth. Using the high figure, this represents 307% of the total gold mined from the face of the earth, loaned mainly to a handful of banks, but could be as many as a hundred.
It may be argued that these were a series of short term loans that have been paid back. But however you slice it, it appears that the world of 10:1 leverage does not operate on the same gold standard the rest of us operate on. This 10:1 leverage, sometimes called "fixed-fractional lending", is "legal" and public knowledge for anyone who wants to know. But it is not well known, nor well understood. And i'm suggesting that there could be an entirely other market that has it's own set of legalities, it's own outrageous leverage, and that is even less known to the average joe who must slave under the unfairness of it all. And in that world, a world of kings, a BILLION DOLLAR BILL would not be unheard of...and a 100 MILLION DOLLAR BILL could be common.
