I wrote an article on it posted on Seeking Alpha a while back.
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'Gold as Money' Means a Potentially Massive Rise in Valuation
One thing that the world has forgotten for the most part, is that gold is money. It has been parroted around for three generations as a commodity only, with little industrial use or demand, and no value as a currency.
Humans have this interesting tendency to forget history, even though through all of time it consistently repeats itself.
The cycle I am speaking of is the one where societies and economies cycle back and forth between paper fiat money backed by nothing but a governments promise that it has value, and currency that is backed by gold and silver.
This is not new, and in my opinion will happen again, as it always has, for thousands of years.
For a while now I have been going on about how the Chinese, OPEC, and other nations that have trillions of USD in their reserves are not going to simply sit on it and watch it devalue by 16%-20% a year because of a rampant monetary inflation policy of the Federal Reserve.
Dollar crisis looms, says Nobel laureate Mundell
Reuters June 3, 2008 at 8:36 AM EDT
VALENCIA, Spain — A major dollar crisis could come within five years and China is discussing reforms to the global monetary system to protect its $1.6-trillion (U.S.) reserves pile, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell.
Mr. Mundell, who has regular contacts with Beijing officials, said they are considering proposing ways to fix major currencies including the dollar and the euro, in a system similar to the one which operated under the Bretton Woods agreement from the end of World War Two until the 1970s.
If you were China and seeing this happen to your National Treasury, would you sit there and do nothing or look for a solution?
The answer is obvious.
China is worried about its pile of about $1.6-trillion in foreign reserves, built up during years of U.S. trade deficits, which loses value as the greenback depreciates.
The excerpts from the above Reuters article shows that China seems to be interested in a gold backed system. If this were to occur, we need to take a serious look at what it means for the price and demand of gold.
I will give you one simple equation, which you can then apply to any nation, or the economy at large. If the USA were to go to a gold backed standard, that means each dollar in circulation would then have to be redeemable in gold. The current measure of USD in circulation based on private firm analysis is above $14 Trillion USD. The US Treasury claims it has 261,498,899.316 ounces of gold according to its website. If we were to divide the number of USD in circulation by the amount of gold claimed to be on hand in the US Treasury, it would make the price of gold $53,537.00 per ounce.
You can perform this calculation on any nations currency, if you know the amount of currency in circulation and the country’s claimed national reserves in gold.
The bottom line is, if the world heads to any form of gold backed currency system, or any world government chooses to make its own currency backed in gold, then two things would happen:
1. That country will be the best runner up for the next world reserve currency
2. The valuation on gold will skyrocket beyond the angels
"Without reform, the global monetary system is headed for a dollar crisis within years, Mr. Mundell believes." I sure hope you own some gold before that happens.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/80165-gold-as-money-means-a-potentially-massive-rise-in-valuation?source=feed
