This article was first published on FT.com
Gold is unlike any other commodity. It is costly to extract from the earth and to refine to a reasonable degree of purity. It is costly to store. It has no remaining uses as a producer good - equivalent or superior alternatives exist for all its industrial uses. It may have some value as a consumer good - somewhat surprisingly people like to attach it to their earlobes or nostrils or to hang it around their necks. I have always considered it a rather vulgar metal, made for the Saturday Night Fever crowd, all shiny and in-your-face, as opposed to the much classier silver, but de gustibus… .
The total stock of ‘above-ground’ gold is about 160,000 metric tonnes (a metric ton is 2,204 lbs. or 35,264 oz, for those of a non-decimal mind-set). About 50 percent of this existing stock of above-ground gold is kept as a pure store of value (for investment purposes), most likely somewhere below-ground, for security reasons. The other 50 percent exists as jewellery. I would argue that most of this jewellery demand is simply small-scale store of value (investment) demand by households, rather than demand driven by aesthetic considerations or other intrinsic sources of joy associated with having gold hanging from your extremities.
From a social perspective, gold held by central banks as part of their foreign exchange reserves is a barbarous relic (Keynes used the expression to refer to the Gold Standard, but close enough is close enough). The same holds for gold held idle in private vaults as a store of value. The cost and waste involved in getting the gold out of the ground only to but it back under ground in secure vaults is considerable. Mining the ore is environmentally damaging, especially if it involves open pit mining. Refining the gold causes further environmental risks. Historically, gold was extracted from its ores by using mercury, a toxic heavy metal, much of which was released into the atmosphere. Today, cyanide is used instead. While cyanide, another toxic substance, is broken down in the environment, cyanide spills (which occur regularly) can wipe out life in the affected bodies of water. Runoff from the mine or tailing piles can occur long after mining has ceased.
Even though, from a social efficiency perspective, the mining of new gold and the costly storage of existing gold…
