
Gold prices soar to 7.5-yr. high as Fed drops “atomic bomb” - AtomicOrbital
https://www.kitco.com/news/2020-04-09/Gold-prices-soar-to-7-5-yr-high-as-Fed-drops-atomic-bomb.html
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AtlasBarfed
Someday 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.

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walterbell
Why does OPEC have extraction limits?

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XorNot
Depends 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.

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walterbell
If 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.

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fred_is_fred
I'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.

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walterbell
Depends 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.

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fred_is_fred
Ah 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?

