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Gold prices soar to 7.5-yr. high as Fed drops “atomic bomb”
- AtlasBarfed 7y agoSomeday SpaceX will float a mining rig up to an asteroid and a year later gold will be worth 1/100th of what it used to be.
- walterbell 7y agoWhy does OPEC have extraction limits?
- XorNot 7y agoDepends on the value of oil. Gold is a pretty useful material for space-based applications, so someone industrially extracting it in orbit may have very little reason not to crash the price.
- walterbell 7y agoIf they can secure their storage, they can sell slowly at high prices. Assuming a capitalist society, profits are one reason not to crash the price, at least until there is competition in asteroid mining, at which point see OPEC.
- fred_is_fred 7y agoI'm curious if that's true. If someone had a supply so large that it was effectively unlimited, that would be a cap on the price. And that cap would dissuade speculators and investors, especially if anyone was worried that this company could start dumping supply to get cash.
- walterbell 7y agoDepends on how long they can limit information on supply. There's also the possibility that new technology which enables discovery and mining could trigger other downstream uses for gold as a raw material, changing the industrial demand curve. There have been periods of high oil prices even when supply was plentiful, caused by many external factors.
- fred_is_fred 7y agoAh I didn't think about increased usage. That makes sense, but I wonder how much of the price is speculation/using gold to store value versus industrial usage?