Originally published at: Here's a visualization of all the extracted gold in the world and which countries own it | Boing Boing
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Bring back the gold standard—we’ll all be rich, I tell you!
The Golden Rule: He who has all the gold makes the rules.
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Am I the only on surprised at how the B2 bomber appears to be a full city block wide? That 3/4 of a billion price tag doesn’t seem quite so outrageous.
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Sure. But how much does it weigh when you extract all the latinum?
It has a 172 foot wingspan. Its pretty darn wide.
A lot of the cost is for non-recurring engineering work (NRE). Originally there was supposed to be 130 B2s instead of the 22 eventually produced, so the NRE costs are averaged across this smaller number of aircraft thereby increasing the per-unit cost.
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Density of tungsten: 19.35 g/cc, density of gold 19.32 g/cc. Sometimes I wonder how much of the “reserves” are just tungsten covered with enough gold to pass an audit. Then again, I am friends with a goldbug who is convinced that the reserves were all sold off long ago, since even Fort Knox was last audited in the 50s, and he claims that the other Federal reserves have resisted all attempts at auditing. Supposedly, Germany bought a bunch of gold from the New York City repository, but the repository has refused to allow the gold to be transferred back to Germany, or even allow a physical audit of the gold Germany now owns. It could just be the usual goldbug paranoia, but I can’t find anything to refute his claims with a quick online search, so who knows?
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That’s not quite correct but also not entirely wrong. Germany didn’t buy the gold but rather about half of the federal German gold reserves have always been held in New York, London and Paris. This is supposed to serve as a hedge against currency crises. If the euro tanks Germany can raise stable money by physically selling gold in a different country with a different currency. Obviously that doesn’t hold for Paris anymore because they use the same currency now and accordingly the Paris reserves had been entirely transferred to Germany by 2017.
It’s a bit different in New York. That gold is also in part being transferred to Germany. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that the (German) federal bank is required to take stock of the gold reserves each year, which is hard to do in the US apparently. Currently around 300t have been transferred from New York to Frankfurt and about 3300t remain. Obviously we don’t know whether the Fed is good for the rest but the gold that was transferred home was assessed and remelted into new bars and in the course of this no anomalies were reported.
However, it is true that in the 2010s two German parliamentarians asked the reserve banks in Paris, London and New York to audit the gold reserves in person and were denied that request for unknown reasons. That led to a popular outcry and a petition to take control of our own gold. That is probably in part the true reason why gold is being transferred back to Germany. The optics are just not good, especially in the Trump era, where we didn’t think we could trust the US government.
(Most of this is from the German Wikipedia article on the German gold reserves; I do not claim to be an expert in these matters)
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