Doesn't The Gold And Other Minerals Replenish or Get Finished After Numerous Extractions?

This is a question I answered on Quora on October 15, 2017. The original post is here: https://www.quora.com/Doesnt-the-gold-and-other-minerals-replenish-or-get-finished-after-numerous-extractions

I’m not sure I understand the question, but I can tell you this: there is only a certain amount of gold in the Earth. Once it’s gone out of one location, it’s gone from there forever. Gold miners have to keep looking for new deposits as their old ones run out. Gold does not “replenish” in the Earth.

Of course, owners of gold jewelry can and do sometimes sell their jewelry to “cash for gold” places. These places then sell them to refineries, who melt them down and cast them back into 400-ounce good delivery bars that circulate within the bullion banking system. This is called “recycling” gold. However, there is never enough gold recycled in a single year to cover that year’s demand for new gold jewelry, much less that plus the year’s demand from gold investors who want to accumulate more bars and coins. So there is always a need for new gold to be found and mined.

Gold is a strange economic good. Once it is mined, it becomes owned by someone who hoards it. But no matter how much of it is owned by human beings, demand always grows every single year. For all of human history, the demand for gold has continued to increase, year after year. For some reason, human beings have never decided that they have enough. They always want more.

This is why almost all human societies prior to 1971 have used gold as money. It is what Von Mises called “the most marketable good”, the good that will always be accepted in trade even if nothing else is.

For more info, you can read the Gold Demand Trends Report (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends) published by the World Gold Council.

But no, gold is never “replenished” in the Earth, and demand keeps rising. So miners must always keep looking for it.

#gold