Here's a little meditation I had and if any of you have a nice calculator handy and a weights and measure equivalency, you might come up with a more refined picture than this.

Gold topped $900 a Troy ounce the other day and then backed off to end the day at about $898 in most commodities markets and finished the week at $880. At some point today it was at $863. The late Isaac Asimov estimated the the entire world supply of accessible gold would fill a cube about forty feet to a side. This estimation was based on the distribution of elements in the Earth's crust. I don't know how accurate that estimation was but it seems reasonable to me and a handy place to start. Most of the gold in the world is in suspension in the oceans so the ready supply is much less than the above stated but let's work with that figure just for fun. And lets be generous and say that gold is at $1000 an ounce.

What do you pay rent at? Mortgage? Groceries and etc.? Again an arbitrary number. Let's say that it costs $2500 a month to get by. Sure some more, some less but you are probably getting my drift. $30,000 a year? a bit much? I think the US average is somewhere around $24,000 but I like the round numbers. If we were on a gold standard and species was minted in the same that would be 300 million (US population in the US numbering system ) times 30 ounces, that's 900 million Troy ounces outlay per annum. Now figure a world economy based on gold: 6+ billion people all using gold in some quantity. How far would that 64,000 cubic feet of gold go? Does today's pricing of gold really reflect it's economic strength? When you figure in it's technical value and aesthetic value and compare it with it's scarcity I believe that gold is way, WAY undervalued. I could be wrong but I'd be interested in what you may think about this. Meanwhile I 'll try to find my slide rule and come up with some more refined data.