Ernest Blogging and Vlogging

Yes I was a doubter of this stat too when NYU Stern School of Business stated it in our Global Economy class.  I believe all of my classmates doubted that too.  But Prof. Zin followed up with the following information.

According to The World Gold Council, the best estimate of the amount of gold that has been mined throughout human history is 165,000 metric tons.  But since gold is remarkably heavy, this weight is equivalent to a volume of 8,500 cubic meters. 

An olympic swimming pool is 50 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 2 meters deep, therefore it has a volume of 2,500 cubic meters.   In other words, all the gold in the world would fit comfortably into 3 and 1/2 olympic-sized swimming pools.  (By the way, for you movie trivia buffs… the $140 billion worth of gold that was stolen from the vaults of the New York Fed in the Samuel L. Jackson-Bruce Willis movie “Die Hard:  With a Vengeance” would have required approximately 4,135 dump trucks to haul away, not the 14 shown in the film.)