To take us back to James Marshall's discovery of gold in 1792, USA. UU., which eventually led to the development of Gold IRA home storage, Emperor Augustus, who reigned in ancient Rome from 31 BC. C.In 14 AD, he set the price of gold between 40 and 42 coins per pound. In other words, a pound of gold could produce 40 to 42 coins.
Gold was first discovered as bright yellow nuggets. Without a doubt, it was the first metal known to the first hominids. Gold became part of all human cultures. Its brilliance, natural beauty and brilliance, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnishing made it pleasant to work and play with.
Because gold is so dispersed throughout the geological world, its discovery occurred in many different groups in many different locations. And almost everyone who found it was impressed with it, as was the developing culture in which they lived. Gold was the first metal widely known to our species. When thinking about the historical progress of technology, we consider that the development of the iron and copper industry is the greatest contribution to the economic and cultural progress of our species, but gold came first.
Gold is the easiest metal to work with. It is in a practically pure and viable state, while most other metals tend to be found in mineral deposits that make it difficult to melt. The first uses of gold were undoubtedly ornamental, and its brilliance and permanence (it does not corrode or tarnish) linked it to the deities and royalty of primitive civilizations. Gold has always been a powerful thing.
We have long since lost the oldest story of human interaction with gold, but its association with the gods, with immortality and with one's own wealth are common in many cultures around the world. The first civilizations equated gold with the gods and rulers, and gold was sought in its name and dedicated it to its glorification. Humans value gold almost intuitively, equating it with power, beauty and the cultural elite. And since gold is widely distributed around the world, we find this same thought about gold in all ancient and modern civilizations around the world.
Gold, beauty and power have always gone hand in hand. In ancient times, gold became sanctuaries and idols (“the golden calf”), plates, cups, vases and vases of all kinds and, of course, into jewelry for personal adornment. The treasure of the “Gold of Troy”, excavated in Turkey and dating from the time 2450 -2600 BC. C.
It was a time when gold was highly valued, but it had not yet become money in and of itself. Rather, it was owned by the powerful and well-connected, or it became objects of worship or was used to decorate sacred places. The “value” of gold was accepted all over the world. Today, as in ancient times, the intrinsic appeal of gold itself has that universal appeal to humans.
But how did gold become a commodity, a unit of measurable value? Gold was money in ancient Greece. The Greeks were mining gold in the Mediterranean and the Middle East regions around 550 BC. Gold was associated with water (that's logical, since most of it was found in streams), and gold was supposed to be a particularly dense combination of water and sunlight. The Incas referred to gold as the “tears of the sun”.
In ancient Egypt, around the time of Seti I (1320 BC, C. Nowadays, in the Turin Museum there is a papyrus and fragments known as the “Carte des mines d'or”. It represents gold mines, mining neighborhoods, roads leading to mines and gold mountains, etc. Where is that gold mine located? Well, you know the thing about treasure maps: there's always something a little vague about them that keeps you off track.
Modern thinking is that it portrays the Wadi Fawakhir region, where the El Sid gold mine is located, but the matter is far from being resolved. Jason and the Argonauts searched for the Golden Fleece around 1200 BC. This Greek myth makes more sense when you realize that the fleece you're referring to is sheep's fleece used to recover fine pleasure gold. The first miners used hydraulic energy to propel golden sand onto the skin of a sheep, which would trap small, but heavy, gold scales.
When the fleece had absorbed everything it could hold, this “golden fleece” was hung to dry and, when dry, it was gently tapped so that the gold would fall off and recover. The first use of gold as money occurred around 700 BC. They were simply stamped pieces of a mixture of 63% gold and 27% silver known as “electrum”. Nowadays, we still talk about the ultra-rich as “rich” like Croesus.
At the time of the death of Alexander of Macedon (323 BC). Some of the mines were owned by the state, others were operated privately with a royalty paid to the state. In addition, nomads, such as the Scythians and the Cimmerians, worked in pleasure mines throughout the region. Both the surviving Greek gold coins and the Scythian jewelry show magnificent art.
The Roman Empire promoted the search for gold. The Romans mined gold extensively throughout their empire and greatly promoted the science of gold mining. They hydraulically diverted water streams to the mine and built gates and the first “long wells”. They were able to exploit the old mines more efficiently and, of course, their main workers were prisoners of war, slaves and convicts.
A monetary standard made the world economy possible. The concept of money, (that is,. During the classic period of Greek and Roman rule in the Western world, both gold and silver flowed to India for spices and to China for silk. At the height of the Empire (A, D.
RECEIVE INTERESTING ITEMS & SPECIAL OFFERS if you wish In addition to betting on gold, silver, platinum and palladium in the form of coins and ingots, we also buy a wide range of numismatic coins. We have especially strong offers for old American gold coins. Central Avenue, 11th Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85012 Get timely prices and special offers emailed to you every day. Most likely, people have discovered gold for the first time in streams and rivers around the world, with its striking beauty and brilliance.
The well-known history of gold goes back a long time, so much so that, according to the National Mining Association, the cultures of present-day Eastern Europe used it for the first time in 4000 BC. to make decorative objects. Gold was generally used for a couple of thousand years only to create things such as jewelry and idols for worship. This was until around 1500 BC.
C., when the former empire of Egypt, which greatly benefited from its gold region, Nubia, turned gold into the first official medium of exchange for international trade. Egypt created what was called the shekel, a coin that weighed 11.3 grams, and became the standard unit of measurement in the Middle East. It was made of a natural alloy called electrum, which contained approximately two-thirds of gold and one-third of silver. It was also around this time that the Babylonians discovered a method called fire testing, one of the most effective ways to test the purity of gold, which is still used today.
A few centuries later, around 1200 BC, the Egyptians discovered that they could alloy gold with other metals to make it stronger and give it different colored pigments. The Egyptians also began experimenting at that time with a method of casting called lost wax casting, in which a duplicate gold sculpture is molded from an original wax sculpture, a process that can be used to create wonderfully intricate sculptures, so much so that it is still used today. . This is where the golden chemical symbol Au comes from to represent gold in the periodic table of the elements.
A little over a thousand years later, in 1066 AD, William the Conqueror of Normandy became the first Norman king of England and, with his conquest, began a new monetary system based on metallic coins in England. With the new coin-based monetary system, the so-called “pounds”, shillings and “pence” were established, with pounds literally being a pound of sterling silver. In 1284, about a hundred years later, Great Britain issued its first gold coin, the florin, while throughout Europe, in present-day Italy, the Republic of Florence issued the first golden duchy, which soon became the most popular gold coin in the world and remained so for another five centuries. The gold coin was minted by a goldsmith named Ephraim Brasher and a few years later, in 1792, the infant U.
ST. The government passed the Coin Minting Act, which placed the country on a bimetallic silver and gold standard, which was maintained in one form or another until 1976, when the United States,. It eventually abandoned the gold standard to rely entirely on fiat money. Going back a bit to 1848, a man named John Marshall found gold flakes in a California stream, starting the California Gold Rush.
The California Gold Rush not only accelerated the settlement of the American West, but it was also the basis for the classic computer game that generations of Americans love so much, The Oregon Trail. A few years later, in 1868, George Harrison, a man from South Africa, discovered gold in his backyard and, since then, 40% of the gold mined in the world comes from the African nation. It is clear that gold has a long and historic history of obsession for more than 6,000 years. The interesting thing about gold is that, for unknown reasons, its mysterious ability to attract people from all over the world independently of one another allowed it to become an accepted medium of exchange anywhere in the world.
At various points in history, gold coins were minted, however, many coins were not minted by any central authority, but were simply minted by ordinary people. This ability to make homemade coins, so to speak, that were accepted as legal tender caused them to have an irregular shape. Obviously, this homemade minting was difficult to regulate and a method called clipping was a common problem with gold and silver coins. The irregular shapes allowed people to cut small pieces from the coins and eventually accumulate enough to melt the bits and create more coins.
Unfortunately, the cutting of hammered coins made the weight of the coin lower than the real value of the coin, so it ceased to be a valuable currency, especially abroad. Another problem was that minted coins, which were protected against cutting by special engraving, were easily counterfeited by casting them with counterfeit molds or stamped with counterfeit dies. The Great Coating of 1696 was an attempt by the English Government to solve the problem with new minting technology, but it was largely a failure. Issues like this led to the adoption of paper money, also known as “fiat money”, which actually began in the early 16th century and was based on the gold standard.
The full history of gold wouldn't be possible without a discussion about the gold standard. The gold standard was a monetary system in which the standard unit of economic account, for example, the U.S. The dollar was based on a fixed amount of gold. With this monetary system, a person holding a certain amount of paper money could go to a bank and exchange that money for a fixed amount of gold.
The gold standard has been completely abandoned by all countries; a process of abandonment that gradually began towards the end of the First World War. Issues such as the problem of minting coins described above and the introduction of paper money began to create problems for nations, mainly because many of them were based on a bimetallic gold and silver pattern. Paper money began to be overvalued in gold, while there were also constant problems of supply imbalances between gold and silver that backed up paper money. As a result, a metal was chosen to support the value of money, which was gold, thus starting the gold standard.
According to the gold standard, the money supply is directly linked to the supply of gold, which means that, during the First World War, many countries decided to temporarily suspend the gold standard in order to be able to print money to pay for their military participation in the war. Unfortunately, this insane impression of money created hyperinflation. Once the war ended, countries began to appreciate the stabilization that the gold standard had provided to their currencies and international trade. However, once the strong political ties between nations changed, international indebtedness skyrocketed and government finances became, to put it mildly, tense.
It became clear that the gold standard could not be maintained during tumultuous times, creating negative sentiment and low confidence in it in the future, worsening economic conditions. However, nations were not yet willing to abandon the gold standard completely, to reestablish it and, at the same time, they were hoping that a new era of international stability would return to the gold standard, but in reality it never happened. The Great Depression was the last straw in many countries. After the stock market crash of 1929, the currencies of European countries were completely misaligned, while some, especially Germany, were still recovering from the First World War.
As people began to lose confidence in banks and in paper money, gold hoarding became commonplace and commodity prices, especially gold prices, rose. The bank rush and the hoarding of gold ended up making banks have to close. Countries began to raise interest rates in an attempt to entice people to keep deposits intact instead of converting their fiat currency into gold, but this exacerbated the problems because it made the cost of doing business much higher. Over time, this led many countries to suspend or completely abandon the gold standard in the early 1930s, including Great Britain.
Interestingly, many of the countries that abandoned the gold standard earlier were able to recover from the depression sooner than those that remained below the gold standard. At that time, the only major countries remaining on the gold standard with significant gold reserves were the United States and France. In the United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a series of measures to prevent gold hoarding, such as forcing banks to hand over all their gold holds to the Federal Reserve, not allowing them to exchange dollars for gold, and also prohibiting any export of gold. In 1934, the Gold Reserve Act was instituted, which prohibited private ownership of gold.
All of the gold was given to the government, which is where much of Fort Knox's gold comes from. This allowed the United States to settle its debts with dollars instead of gold. Over time, the United States essentially took over the global gold market. In the 1960s, inflation was high and U.S.
gold reserves had been significantly reduced to help pay for the reconstruction of Europe and other parts of the world after the destruction of World War II. In 1968, several countries that dominated the global supply of gold decided to stop selling gold on the London market, allowing the market to determine the price of gold. In 1971, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, changed the price of an ounce of gold to 38 USD and no longer allowed the Federal Reserve to exchange dollars for gold. This was essentially the end of the gold standard, but it wasn't until 1976 that the gold standard was completely abandoned and gold officially became free.
While the gold standard appears to have been largely a failure, the system has advantages. The inability of governments to inflate the value of money because it is linked to the supply of gold makes it difficult for inflation to increase significantly, while a globally accepted gold standard sets exchange rates and reduces economic uncertainty. However, high inflation can occur when war destroys large parts of economies, as was exemplified after the First World War. The inability to increase the money supply is often cited as the key issue under the gold standard.
Many blamed the gold standard for prolonging the Great Depression, since the money supply could not be increased to mitigate the effects of the depression. As mentioned earlier, this led many countries to finally abandon the gold standard entirely and never look back. Some economists also believe that the inability to increase the money supply according to the gold standard places a limit on how much an economy can grow. This is because as the productive capacity of an economy grows, so does its money supply, but since the money supply is limited by the amount of gold an economy has at any given time, the capacity of an economy to produce more and grow is also limited.
Angie Picardo, from NerdWallet, believes that a perfect and current example of the dangers of the gold standard could be seen during the global financial crisis in the eurozone, especially in Greece. Although the euro is not linked to gold, the nature of the euro's fixed exchange rate throughout the euro area made it very difficult for struggling economies to get out of the crisis. The need to maintain a fixed exchange rate with other stronger economies in the eurozone made it difficult to manipulate the euro and the money supply to combat the effects of the crisis. Roubini argues that the gold standard and other fixed exchange rate regimes also exacerbate changes in the business cycle.
Roubini stated: “When there was a traditional gold standard, periods of boom and bust with really large swings in economic activity were the norm. Only when we switched to fiat money were central banks able to smooth the business cycle and make it less volatile, as we did during the financial economic crisis. Some have cited that another disadvantage of the gold standard is that countries with fewer reserves are at a significant disadvantage compared to those with more gold reserves. Roubini warned that the gold standard always leaves the door open to a possible gold rush, which can cause enormous problems and side effects if those countries don't have enough gold to exchange it for paper money.
There are still supporters of the gold standard, many of whom came to light during the global financial crisis, claiming, among other advantages, that the gold standard would create greater price stability than issuing fiat money based solely on trust. Austrian economic theory is famous for favoring the gold standard. Defenders of the Austrian economy believe that the manipulation of the money supply after the abandonment of the gold standard is what has actually led to the instability of global financial markets over the years. The Mises Institute, which describes itself as “the global epicenter of the Austrian economic movement”, states that restoring the convertibility of the dollar by a fixed peso into gold would be a step in the right direction and would help to eliminate monetary policy from politics to “reduce corruption with special interests”.
Having presented the above advantages and disadvantages, there is no doubt that the prevailing economic view is that the gold standard is not a feasible way forward. However, it must be said that, as with many things in this world, every coin has two sides. If you've come this far, you'll know that gold has a long history of human obsession that goes back more than 5000 years. Since the first time mankind saw gold, it has aroused an insatiable desire for metal that has never wavered.
That mutual desire for gold that captivated civilizations around the world independently of one another facilitated the global adoption of gold as a medium of exchange and, later, of course, the gold standard. Since the end of the gold standard, the price and production of gold have skyrocketed worldwide, and along with that, so has demand. Judging from the last 5000 years, it seems unlikely that our obsession with the precious metal will change anytime soon. The first pure gold coin was minted in the kingdom of Lydia (in present-day Turkey) between 650 and 600 BC.
As global trade evolved between Europe, Africa and Asia, the minting of coins became essential thanks to their portability and durability. Political leaders preferred currencies because they could control their production and, therefore, their circulation. Several attempts were made to recover the gold standard, but the price of gold continued to rise too high. Because of this, most gold price charts start sometime in the 1970s, when gold prices began to vary significantly.
King Croesus of Lydia would improve gold refining techniques and establish the first international gold currency. The Greeks had begun mining gold in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, causing Plato and Aristotle to speculate on its origin. In fact, gold was largely responsible for creating the concept of money itself, giving rise to some of the first gold coins in 700 BC. The following chart shows the price of gold since 1968, with some notable events in the gold market.
Gold was discovered in its most basic and natural state, in streams and on the ground of the ancient world, and gold is one of the first precious metals known to mankind. The discovery of large gold deposits in western North America caused numerous gold fevers in the 19th century. With the end of the gold standard and the availability of ingots to the general public in the United States, the history of the price of gold was about to change. Gold was also less of a status symbol in Roman culture, reducing the use of gold for elaborate ornaments.
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