Getting off the Gold Standard

The Almighty Dollar isn't back by gold anymore, in fact no currency is. There was a time when you could take a dollar bill to a bank and (in theory anyway) get $1 worth of gold for it. When it was decided to go off the gold standard, it was a Big Deal. The government created the fiction that it was still backing the dollar with gold, but in reality you dollar is backed merely by the credit of the US Government, with other currencies back the same way. This is all fine except when it goes wrong and you get hyperinflation spirals etc., but even there it's possible to dump value into other tangible assets for transport to other more stable countries. The upshot of the whole program as been a complex combination of lending, credit, inflation, recession and innovation that has propelled the world economy forward for most of a century.

I've always wondered though, "how much gold is there really?" which is another way of asking, "how much higher is the ceiling now than if we stayed on the gold standard?"

I ran across this today:
Finally, global gold mine production is between 2,500 to 3,000 tons per year and about 155,000 tons of gold would have been mined as of 2006, with a total value of $3.2 trillion at June 2006 prices. Underground an estimated 50,000 ton is left and booked as “reserves” on the balance sheets of mining companies.

For reference, the proposed US Government Budget for 2008 is $2.9 trillion.

Neat! :)

[As an aside, I don't really know how the anarchocapitalists tackle this problem. Anarchocapitalism seems to be gold standard type of economy, although in theory it could be backed by any asset. I should find out, but without the concept of a central bank, I think it isn't possible to pull off this fiction. I still think the biggest mistake Bremmer made in Iraq was not getting the central bank back up in 30 days.]