价值与价格，为什么黄金不适合用作货币

价值与价格，为什么黄金不适合用作货币

There was recently a post about gold as investment, and gold as money. In that post, the author claimed that the price of gold should not change throughout history. This notion is both outdated and impossible to sustain. Here is a simply illustration of why.

10 years ago, there was no google, and now everybody use it. Google has a market cap of $170bil. This wealth has been created out of thin air. 30 years ago, Microsoft was in its infancy, nowadays, it has a cap of $214bil. Add in $270bil from Apple, which started 40 years ago. This 3 companies has a total market cap of $650bil.

To put this into perspective, the total world production of gold is ~2500ton, or 2.5million kg. With today's price at $1300/oz, the entire value of the annual production of entire world is only 2.5 million * 1000 (g/kg) /28 (g/oz) * 1300 (1/oz) = $116 billion. And this is at today's bloated price. With the price 2 years ago, the value would have been at $60bil. There is just not enough gold produced to back up the growth of the economy.

Take another example, 2010 year-to-date auto sale is 13 million. With an estimated cost of 25K each, that'll add up to over $300mil. Remember, each car is produced from basic starting material.

In the end, gold as currency is plain impossible, since the economy is too large and gold production can't keep up.

Today, gold still has a role to play in any investor's portfolio, but only as a hedge against inflation. This is especially true since gold doesn't produce any significant on-going monetary benefit, which is in stark contract with stock (dividend) or real estate (shelter, thus rent or saved rent).

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I thought this idea was pretty original, until I checked wikipedia, which says following. Obviously, when various governments changed from gold standard to fiat money, they have this in their mind.
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Monetary exchange

Gold has been widely used throughout the world as a vehicle for monetary exchange, either by issuance and recognition of gold coins or other bare metal quantities, or through gold-convertible paper instruments by establishing gold standards in which the total value of issued money is represented in a store of gold reserves.

However, the amount of gold in the world is finite and production has not grown in relation to the world's economies. Today, gold mining output is declining.[10] With the sharp growth of economies in the 20th century, and increasing foreign exchange, the world's gold reserves and their trading market have become a small fraction of all markets and fixed exchange rates of currencies to gold were no longer sustained. At the beginning of World War I the warring nations moved to a fractional gold standard, inflating their currencies to finance the war effort. After World War II gold was replaced by a system of convertible currency following the Bretton Woods system. Gold standards and the direct convertibility of currencies to gold have been abandoned by world governments, being replaced by fiat currency in their stead. Switzerland was the last country to tie its currency to gold; it backed 40% of its value until the Swiss joined the International Monetary Fund in 1999.[11]
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