Market value of gold
When you are, as I am, going to write about the value of gold on a market, you start to understand the complexity of gold. Because you then have to define not only the market but also the concept of value and also gold itself.
Each person with a piece or grain of gold values that on his own circumstances.
I was on a dinner party the other week. At the end of the dinner we were served chocolates to the coffee. The chocolates had a tiny piece of gold on top as a decoration. I would not dream of taking that flake off the chocolate to save it for an occassion later.
Would I had been in another situation, e.g. born in a gold mining community, with a family to support and with a struggle to get the daily life to work with food, water and cooking facilities to concern about, then I would not dream to eat the gold.
In neither case I would dream to convert the value of the gold into money.
In Sweden you can still from time find treasures in the ground as collections of coins. They were hidden in the times of warfare. They actually are messages from the times when money was traded as physical metal. Money nowadays are just a proof that you have a tradeable credit on a banking institution such as central banks. Central banks prints money and sells money by buying bankinstruments created by banks. So a dollar is only worth as much as somebody thinks it worth in a trade. Just as gold. Gold is on the otherhand tradeable into any currency without any restrictions.
Money on the other hand if worse comes to worse in best case can be made into a soup of paper and eaten.
Anyhow, money as a credit can be transferred in quite another way than gold. Anybody may have a bank account. Gold is mostly traded in its physical form.
To be continued
