Thursday, January 17, 2008

Great Article Explaining Gold

If you're going to read only one article about gold, this is it. It's long, but worth it.

Why the Global Financial System is About to Collapse Part 1 Part 2

Thanks to Ben for bringing this article up again. I remember reading it a couple years ago, but it really resonates now in light of recent events.

2 comments:

Sanjeev Singh said...

Jon,

Isn't there an upper limit to the price of gold? Which is the cost (in Dollars) of getting it out of sea water? My rough calculations based on unsubstantiated google searches throws up 500 MILLION tons of gold in the worlds seas. Furthermore, as technology improves, won't this (inflation-adjusted) price just keep going down? This is the long term, of course. Gold could still be good in the short term.

Jon Perlow said...

If this is true and somebody invented a cheap way to extract the gold from the oceans, it would probably mean that gold would no longer be useful as money. We'd have to find something else to use.

There's nothing really fundamental that makes gold the only thing that can be used as money. There are other things we could use. The main thing you want is that it's hard to counterfeit and expensive to make more of it, especially for the government.