However, South Africa has larger reserves, and by 1930 was producing 53% of the world’s new gold. That was the start of the Great Depression, which slowed down economic activity around the world, beginning 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.
President Franklin Roosevelt raised the official price of gold (in effect, inflating the value of the US dollar, which had been suffering from the deflationary effects of the Depression) from $20.67 to $35.
The United States government became a buyer and seller of gold at that price. However, United States residents could not own gold except in the form of jewelry. At that point, the US government held 6070 tonnes.
At the new price of $35 per ounce, gold production increased to 1200 tonnes by 1940. (A “tonne” is 1000 kilograms, or 2205 pounds). By 1938 it had 11,340 tonnes. Its holdings peaked in the early 50s at 22,000 tonnes. So Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel GOLDFINGER (in which Goldfinger plots to steal the gold from Fort Knox) came out at about the peak.
Although the US dollar was officially redeemable for gold at the $35 per ounce rate, most of the world was content to leave the gold in Fort Knox and hang on to their dollars. In the early 1960s, however, President Charles de Gaulle of France made a political and economic point of redeeming US dollars for gold. After all, we’d already driven the Nazis out of France, forgiven France’s war debts, and if the USSR ever invaded Western Europe he could count on our support anyway.
In the 1950s the production of new gold was around 1000 tonnes per year. This slowly increased to 2400 tonnes in the 1990s. It peaked in 2001 at 2640 tonnes.
For many years South Africa continued to be the world’s largest miner of gold, but its production slowly went down. In 2007 it was replaced by China.
South Africa continues to have the second largest gold reserves in the world. However, many of those reserves are so far below the ground, or of such poor quality, that they’re not economically worth mining unless the price of gold becomes very high.
Russia has the most gold reserves. Australia has the third highest amount of gold reserves, followed by the United States, Canada, Indonesia and Peru.
Source by Richard Stooker
How Gold Is Made The Mining and Refinement Process Basics
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