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Show THE MONOPOLY ON GOLD Gold as anyone will agree, is a pleasant commodity to h,av.e ut economists have been wondering for some time if it isn t possible to have too much of it so much, indeed, that there is a danger of it becoming economically valueless The case in point is the United States government Five years ago we had a little more than 195,000,000 ounces of !To0inoS0ld- Tday We haVG 0Ver doubIe that amount 431,200,000 ounces. And the yellow metal is still coming into this country from abroad at an accelerating rather than a diminishing rate. Hardly a week goes by without a gold shipment. If this gold were melted down into a single ingot it wouldn't be as imposing a spectacle as you might imagine It would make a bar measuring 62 by 20 by 20 feet But that bar would have the incredible value at our artificially established gold price of $35 per ounce of over $15,000,000,- More important than the mere money value of our gold is te fact th?t it represents pretty close to 60 per cent of all the monetary gold in the world. Almost equally important, import-ant, as the United States News points out, is the fact that the remaining forty-odd per cent is extremely badly divided. England and France have the bulk of it. A number of small powers have some. And three of the great powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, have practically none not more than 4 per cent of the total. Gold is flowing into this country for a variety of reasons. One is that under our law, the treasury must accept every ounce offered and pay $35 for it in our currency, whether it can be used or not (and today, our gold reserve is almost infinitely greater than our requirements, figuring on the most conservative basis). Another increasingly potent reason rea-son is that European capital is frightened over the possibility possi-bility of war, and wants to get its money as far away from the scene of pending hostilities as possible. The outlook then, is for our gold imports to continue to soar. Even today, to-day, it is corrting in at the rate of $100,000,000 a week and if that rate were to be continued, in three years we should have every ounce of monetary gold in the world. And that's what has the economists puzzled. It is obviously ob-viously possible, especially in the case of war, that we may find ourselves with practically a complete corner on gold. No other country would have enough to be worth mentioning. And, in that event, they would have to tie their monetary systems to some other standard of value. Already that is being done in the fascist countries with their infinitesimal gold reserves. Germany, for example, has virtually announced an-nounced to the world that it can and will get along without . gold. And by the use of the barter system, "blocked marks", etc., it has gotten along so far. Whether it can keep going in the future without further imperiling its more or less tottery tot-tery economic structure is a matter of conjecture. It is hardly a matter for conjecture, however, that if all the other powers, finding themselves witout gold, got together to-gether and decided to revise their mfonies and trade to fi' some other standard, it could eventually be done. And ther we slmiiM find onrsnivos with about $25,000,000,000 worth o gold which was useful for ornament, and for almost nothing else. But that, of course, is not an imminent possibility France and England, which . still are the great financia' powers of Europe, have shown no inclination to throw goV overboard. And the fact that gold has been the symbol ot sound value and security to the human race for tens of centuries would likewise make extremely difficult its abolishment abolish-ment as the primary instrument of international trade and the mainstav of currencies. 1 Some talk is going the rounds about the possibility that this government might use its huge gold reserve to bring inf ntion. It certainly could be done. But, judging by the emitious. "non-experimental" attitude of the present con-gvps?. con-gvps?. th-p's small danger of any significant inflation occurring oc-curring soon. |