/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>53631949
>The reserves is how much gold is left in the ground.
Tbf they are pulling those numbers out of their ass. It's nothing but conjectures and projections. If the price of gold were to do a x10, you can bet a lot more gold would be added to said reserves, because it would become economically viable to get it from the bottom of the ocean or blow up mountains in natural parks.

Personally i'm more interested with the energy cost of extracting PMs. Because the less metal there is, the more difficult it become to extract. We now deploy insane amounts of Megajoules just to find tiny pieces of rock.
It's only allowed while fossil fuels are absurdly cheap. Think about it, the entire industry rely on cheap diesel alone, as operations are taking place in remote locations, far from the electric grid.
For the sake of the argument, lets imagine for a minute diesel disappear, and we go back to XVIIIth c. methods. Considering we mined the easy stuff a long time ago (hell, even the difficult stuff), it would probably require x50 the human resources/labor to extract the same amount compared to 300 years ago.

And since PMs are a store of value, ie storing human labor in a tangible, durable element, it means that PMs now are far more valuable because of how much more work it would require to extract it.
Ofc it's true for literally everything else, oil is everywhere, but even more so for the mining industry, since it's their first operational cost by far.

So if energy = value, then PM = max value.
The more expensive energy gets, the more relative instrisic value they carry.
That's said, it's a double edged sword, if tomorrow we figure out magic free energy, the price will take a big hit (as for pretty much everything else).