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Why Warren Buffett's latest gold rant is completely wrong
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Thursday, February 09, 2012
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From Economic Policy Journal:

Warren Buffett is out with an anti-gold rant in Fortune magazine:

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 infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be about $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 ExxonMobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?


Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today's...

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Topics: Gold | Warren_Buffett | Precious_Metals
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