Gold Mining And Production And More
The two countries which are United States and Australia in the 1850?s are the key gold mining discoverer and remained significant gold producers.
Having the most gold reserve, we have Russia. And the third highest amount of gold reserves followed by the United States, Canada, Indonesia and Peru is Australia.
The official price of gold has been officially raised by President Franklin Roosevelt from $20.67 to $35 (in effect, inflating the value of the US dollar, which had been suffering from the deflationary effects of the Depression).
The government of the United States became a buyer and seller of gold at that price and the United States residents can own gold in the form of jewelry but not the gold bar and in that position, 6070 tonnes is held by the US government.
Gold production increased to 1200 tonnes at a new price of $35 per ounce in 1940 (A “tonne” is 1000 kilograms, or 2205 pounds). 11,340 tonnes is in hand by 1938 and its holdings peaked at 22,000 tonnes by 1950?s in which Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel GOLDFINGER (in which Goldfinger plots to steal the gold from Fort Knox) came out at about the peak.
Most of the world was contented to leave the gold in Fort Knox and hang on to their dollars since the US dollar was officially redeemable for gold at the $35 per ounce rate. President Charles de Gaulle of France, in the early 1960?s made a political and economic point of redeeming US dollars for gold after all, they?d already driven the Nazis out of France, absolve France’s war debts, and if the USSR ever assaulted Western Europe he could count on our support anyway.
1000 tonnes per year was the production of new gold in the 1950?s which slowly increased to 2400 tonnes in the 1990s and peaked in 2001 at 2640 tonnes.
Continuing to be the world’s largest miner of gold for many years is South Africa but it slowly went down in the production and China replaced them in 2007.
But still, South Africa continues to have the second largest gold reserves in the world though many of those reserves are so far below the ground or of such poor quality, that they’re not reasonably worth mining unless the cost of gold becomes very high.
By 1930, South Africa has larger reserves and was producing 53% of the world’s new gold and was the start of the Great Depression, that has slowed down economic activity around the world, starting with the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, the failure of the Credit Anstalt Bank of Austria in 1931 and Great Britain’s suspension of the gold standard in 1931.
Curious to learn about production mining? If so better go through mine development with the quickness.