Golds Greatest Use
"Gold is the proven, quality, long-term wealth store during a slide into deep crisis - the one which everyone else comes to in a bit of a panic.
Even if, to begin with, the early buyers are buying gold purely to protect their wealth they still tend to multiply their money, because they are subconsciously anticipating future demand. The best investments do this."
Gold's Greatest Use
People always ask 'But what’s the use of gold?' which encourages some experts to pretend gold is vital for dentistry and electronics. It isn't. The fact is that gold is hardly useful at all in industry, but that certainly does not mean it is not useful at all.
So let's explain clearly why gold has repeatedly become one of the most fundamentally useful things there is in human society, and to do that let's first recognize its main quality - its reliably rare supply.
How Much Gold Is There?
Even with modern technology gold is still incredibly difficult to find. In total about 160,000 tonnes of gold have been taken out of the Earth.
That 160,000 tonnes is less than you might think. Formed into a single gold cube it wouldn’t quite cover a tennis court. In fact it would be 2 metres short. But that’s all the gold in the world.
Gold is being mined at about 2,600 tonnes a year, so the above ground supply is expanding at 1.6% per annum. This newly mined supply means the world's cube of gold - currently 20.2 metres across - is growing by just 11 cm per year.
All the world's gold will cover a tennis court when the above ground stock is 205,000 tonnes. This will be some time around 2025.
205,000 tonnes is approximately the sum of the current above ground stocks (approximately 160,000 tonnes) plus the aggregate un-mined known reserves of all the world's gold mining companies (approximately 45,000 tonnes).
That's all the world's gold - both above ground, and known about but still underground.
How Is That Gold Used?
Gold is not consumed in any meaningful sense. A tiny amount finds some use as false teeth because of its inertness, and some is used in electronics because of its non-corrosive nature and excellent conductivity.
But currently well over 95% of the world's gold is held as a wealth store - either in bullion vaults or as jewelry, which is generally considered a private monetary reserve (particularly in India, the world's biggest gold customer).
This stock of gold isn't disappearing, and its supply is growing at a very slow rate (1.6% pa) compared to its overall stock. This feature of a nearly fixed above ground quantity, growing slowly, has been true for about 4,000 years.
So you can now see that there exists a large, but not too large, and almost fixed quantity of gold in the world, almost all of which is held by its owners as a tangible store of wealth. That is something which is true of nothing else.
By contrast to gold's restricted supply our money systems are currently expanding out of control. Modern loose monetary policies - designed to keep the factories busy - are expanding the supply of currency, under political direction, by at least 11% per annum; and that's for the Euro, the most hawkishly managed of the modern world's major currencies.
In such circumstances gold's reliable rarity is again noticed by savers. Its great use is as a money proxy when artificial forms of money (which are far more common) are not being properly restricted in supply.
In such times gold's unexpandable supply causes it to be a much more reliable store of purchasing power than currency. Nothing does this job so reliably and so well as gold, because nothing matches the unimpeachable rarity and stability of gold's above ground supply.
Better still, as people come to remember and appreciate this unique quality their demand for gold causes not just a retention of purchasing power, but a multiplication of it.
Gold - A Tool of Trade
Here's a 2,000 year old Roman explanation of a vital tool of trade.
"The origin of buying and selling began with exchange
Anciently money was unknown, and there existed no terms by which merchandise could be precisely valued. Every one, according to the wants of the time and circumstances, exchanged things useless to him, against things which were useful; for it commonly happens that one is in need of what another has in excess.
But it seldom coincided in time that what one possessed the other wanted, or vice versa. So a device was chosen whose value remedied by its homogeneity the difficulties of barter."
Trade is right at the heart of human society, and it creates the need for this 'device' to store value for later exchange. The device needs homogeneity - constancy of form and quantity - which most governments attempt to deliver with paper money, and they are successful most of the time.
But when the going gets tough governments bend their own rules. They start to issue more and more money, and then nothing exists which matches the homogeneity of gold.
The Romans joined a long list of civilisations which chose gold as a reliable, apolitical, monetary medium. Before them there were the great classical civilisations of the Greeks, Persians, Ionians, and the Egyptians.
After them there were many more, through the Spanish, French, Ottoman, British and American empires, all of them with gold based monetary systems.
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