...his disingenuous reply was that there isn't enough gold in the world to cover the US money supply.The entire pile of gold ever mined in history would make an approx 82 foot cube (more than half of that has been mined since about 1950), or 952,763,904 cubic inches, or 7+ humans per cubic inch. That quantity of gold would represent your lifetime earnings. His reply wasn't disingenuous.
I don’t think his reply was disingenuous either, I just don’t think he understands how a gold standard works.
You don’t need a large amount of gold for everyone to make it work, the government doesn’t even need to hoard most of the gold. All that needs to happen is for them to open the gold window, and the dollar / gold oz price remains the same as the market determines what the demand for dollars is. As demand for dollars decreases, people go to the gold window to redeem for gold, removing excess dollars, and as demand increases, people redeem dollars for gold, thus keeping the dollar / gold price the same.
The entire pile of gold ever mined in history would make an approx 82 foot cube (more than half of that has been mined since about 1950), or 952,763,904 cubic inches, or 7+ humans per cubic inch. That quantity of gold would represent your lifetime earnings. His reply wasn't disingenuous.
Gold can be beaten out to 5millionths of an inch, so 952*106 by 5*106 is 4760*1012 or 33*1012 sq.ft.
The total US coin and paper (which is the only thing that need to be replaced by physical gold) is 800 milliard dollars http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/calculations.html states that 1000 milliard in Benjimans stacked 7ft high world cover 96768 sq.ft. call it 100,000 to allow for the sides. Even in singles it's only 10 million sq.ft.
The gold available is a million times more than adequate to cover that.