Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball in-field.) At $1,750 per ounce—gold's price as I write this—its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases,
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Argument against the long term disadvantages of gold purchase. An ounce of gold now is still an ounce of gold 20 years from now. That's not entirely useful compared to purchases that enable additional long term value.
