DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Let’s suppose the United States had to pay off its accumulated debt in gold. How much gold would that be, based on today’s market prices?

A standard gold bar that weighs a kilogram measures 80mm × 40mm × 18mm, or 3.15? × 1.58? × 0.71?.

The spot price of gold is about $1,200 per ounce, which is $19,200 per pound, or $38,400,000 per ton.
A ton is approximately 907 kilos, so there would be 907 one-kilogram bars in a stack of gold weighing a ton.

The national debt is over $18,000,000,000,000 and climbing rapidly, but I’ll peg it at $18 trillion, just to make the calculations easier.

When I looked into how much gold would be needed to add up to $18 trillion, the scale of the resulting graphic would have been too exaggerated to make visual sense — the astronaut standing next to the gold bar would have been too tiny to be recognizable in a normal-sized image. The calculations below are based on paying off one quarter of the national debt, or $4,500,000,000,000 ($4.5 trillion).

To determine the number of tons of gold needed for the payoff, we divide $4,500,000,000,000 by $38,400,000 per ton, arriving at an approximate figure of 117,188 tons. At 907 kilos per ton, 106,310,712 one-kilo gold bars are required.

The bars in the resulting pile would be stacked 474 long, 474 wide, and 474 high. Using the dimensions of each individual bar as given above, the rectangular solid formed by the whole pile would be 37.9m × 19m × 8.5m, or 124 feet long, 62 feet wide, and 28 feet high.

That’s as big as a McMansion, but remember: it represents only 25% of the national debt. Four of those piles taken together would be as big as the Ritz.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2015 at 06:43 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.