4 - War, peace, deflation and recession

Summary

In the Goldfinger movie of 1964, as based on Ian Fleming's 1959 book, the eponymous Goldfinger accumulates as much gold as possible for “50 years” and then attempts to render the US Fort Knox gold stock radioactive. With the Fort Knox gold reserve unable to circulate, the idea is that the value of the remaining gold stock should increase dramatically. This would be the result of an act of terrorism (“economic chaos in the West”) to enhance Goldfinger's personal wealth.

Although this might bring to mind the real and equally fiendish efforts by Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, to monopolize oil and gas wealth, consider the question of whether the act of making radioactive the gold in Fort Knox would devalue that gold at all. If everyone respected that the United States had the same amount of gold before and after Fort Knox became radioactive, then the price of gold would be unaffected. The gold would still be in Fort Knox, and it would still be valued at the international price of gold.

Friedman (1994) tells the story of Yap, an island in Micronesia that during the twentieth century used stone wheels (“fei”) for money hewn from limestone rock on an island 400 miles away. One large wheel had been made for an islander and was being delivered by boat; the boat capsized, and the wheel sank to the bottom. The islanders acknowledged that the islander owned the wheel in the sea and gave monetary credit against the value of that wheel even though it could not be retrieved.

The stone wheel story illustrates how an asset's value holds, even if it is not in circulation. The world may be less trusting than the people of Yap, however. It might not respect the US ownership of the Fort Knox gold if it was radioactive, which, like the Yap stone, could no longer circulate. If not, then this would effectively decrease the quantity of the gold from the rest of the world stock of gold. The decrease in the gold supply would make the remaining gold more valuable, as Goldfinger envisaged.

A decrease in gold, as in Goldfinger's scheme and Friedman's sinking of a stone near Yap, actually occurred in the United States when the SS Central America, or “the Ship of Gold”, sank in September 1857 with thousands of pounds of gold that New York bankers were awaiting.