Making your Dash Count

It’s Elemental- Gold- AU September 17, 2017

*Standard Disclaimer applies.

I know that there are many of you who are major fans of gold.

I would like to know, why?  It is not the rarest of metals.  You learned that yesterday, yet it has been prized for jewelry and other forms of ornamentation as far back 5000 BCE in Egypt. We use gold in dental work; It is used for coating certain space satellites, & in plating. It is a good reflector of infrared.

Gold is found just about everywhere geographically; in nature it’s found in free metal and in Calaverite, or gold telluride ore;.  It’s estimated that there are about 187,000 tonNES of it above ground. You don’t even need to dig for it. (187,000 metric tonNES= about 206,132 plain old regular Imperial tons,.) THAT is a lot of gold. Los Alamos Lab tells us that all the refined gold, ever refined, “could be placed in a single cube 60 ft. on a side.” That is hard to fathom given all the Zales, Kaye Jewelers and Jared’s pawning the stuff.

About 50% of mined gold is used for jewelry; and 10% is used in industry.

As metals go for jewelry, it really isn’t all that valuable, just prized. It’s beautiful and malleable. Its price has more to do with demand than with supply.

Consider Platinum. It is 10x rarer than gold, yet it’s market price is close to gold. That makes no sense. People seem to prefer the obvious gold finish.  I don’t really understand why people even buy white gold, when platinum’s lister is so superior, oh, and rare.

Gold also serves as an international standard of measurement (ITS-90.) 1337.33 Kelvin, 1064.18^o Celsius, and 1947.52^o Fahrenheit are defined by the freezing point of gold. (Yes, your gold jewelry is frozen gold.) (It is only ONE part of what defines our temperature scale- triple points of water, hydrogen, argon, etc.. all factor in.)

Do you know where your gold comes from?  Next time you buy a piece, ask your jeweler. S/he should know.  Under Dodd-Frank, all public companies are required to file form SD- The Conflict Minerals Report to the SEC. This requires them and their entire supply chain to report the smelters used to melt the gold ore. This is to keep conflict sourced gold (tin, tungsten and tantalum) out of the supply chain. It is these ores that are financing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This requirement is to help shut off that funding.

(Note that I am leaving my political commentary out of this. Daily I work on documenting the smelters of the metals used in our products. I do have opinions. Many. J)

So that is gold.  IF you buy it, know where it was sourced (your diamonds, too.) If you use it in your work, you understand its material value.

Gold- it’s not just for jewelry.