UsableMarkets

I’m currently reading the book The Dollar Crisis (more on that later), which discusses at length the consequences of the failure of Bretton Woods. (For those of you with more important things to do than study issues in global economics from the 1970′s, Bretton Woods was a system whereby the US dollar was pegged to US gold reserves, and all other currencies had a fixed exchange rate to the dollar. Nixon moved us off of this system.)

This prompted me to ask the question: how much gold do we have right now, and what could we do with that gold if we wanted to pay down some of our debt?

Value of US held gold vs total US debt, and the US current account deficit
Click for a larger image

The answer: um, not much.

Data used for the chart:

• Current Account Deficit, January, 2010 (BEA): $108,000,000,000.00
• US National Debt, March 12, 2010 (brillig.com’s debt clock): $12,551,152,277,197.10
• US Gold Reserves, December, 2009 (IMF): 8133.5 tonnes
• Conversion: 1 tonne equals 32150.7466 troy oz.
• Price of Gold, March 11, 2010 (CNN): $1,107.50
• Value of gold reserves at current prices: $289,609,142,949.24

~alex