Silver Vigilante | August 17 2012 | Thanks, Thomas
Remember not too long ago, back when the human mind hadn’t begun its forced evolution of understanding really big numbers like trillions and quadrillions? Back before TARP handed out 16 trillion to domestic and offshore banks? Or before the War of Terror cost the US taxpayer $4 trillion?
Seems like just yesterday…
For those who have decided to stay awake for their fleecing, dealing with a trillion of anything is becoming normal in our daily lives. For others, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big numbers, be they millions, billions or quadrillions.
I got to wondering: How many ounces of gold has the War of Terror cost the US taxpayer? Well, the current price of gold is $1,616.80. The New York Times conservatively reported in 2008 that the cost of the Iraq War was approximately $5,000 per second or 3.2 ounces of gold. Basically one of these:
The overall estimated cost of war, according to Brown University’s Cost of War study, is $4 trillion dollars. How many ounces of gold would one need in order to finance a War of Terror?
Based on gold’s current price of $1,616.80, and Brown University’s estimated cost of the war of $4 trillion, the War of Terror has cost the United States taxpayer approximately 2,474,022,761 troy ounces of gold. Include the UK’s costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, as of 2010, of another $20 billion dollars, and that brings the total gold troy ounces needed to fund the Iraq War to 2,486,392,875 troy ounces of gold or more than 12 million troy ounces of gold on the United Kingdom taxpayers’ tab.
Overall, that’s 77,335.5 tonnes of gold in a world where approximately 2500 tonnes of gold is mined each year. Above ground, it is estimated that there is 155,000 tons of gold. And so, the total costs of the War of Terror amount to just under half of the worlds’ gold supply.
That is 2-and-a-half billion ounces of gold that the War of Terror has cost.