When was gold first valued

By Aug. The price has trended a bit lower since the start of as investors have taken profits and started to bet on rising inflation and the possibility that the Federal Reserve will intervene and raise short-term interest rates. On Oct. The below chart tracks the price of gold since , compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, inflation, and other factors.

Note: Between and , annual average gold prices are used. December monthly gold price averages are used from to The last business day of December is used from on. Like all markets, gold prices are subject to forces of supply and demand. When it comes to gold, supply is affected by trading trends as well as by mining companies digging up more gold that they can put into the market.

One of the key factors impacting demand is the current market sentiment on inflation. When inflation rises, the value of the dollar goes down, and some investors flock to gold in hopes that it serves as a stable store of value.

Interest rates are tied to inflation, so they have historically been closely related to gold prices, as well. When the dollar's strength increases and inflation decreases, then interest rates could be expected to fall at the same time as gold prices. Inflation is decreasing, so cash-like investments don't need to offer such high-interest rates, and fewer people are rushing to gold as a stable store of value.

When people refer to the "spot price" of gold, they simply mean the price at which you could buy gold at that moment. Commodity traders, who often trade futures, are the ones most likely to differentiate the spot price from the "futures price," or the price guaranteed by a futures contract.

World Gold Council. Vaikuntam Iyer Lakschmanan and Barun Gorain. Congressional Research Service. Peter J. Federal Reserve History. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. London time in London Bullion Market, based in U. Gold Price. Yahoo Finance. The National Bureau of Economic Research. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. This leaves us with the middle area of the periodic table, the "transition" and "post-transition" metals.

This group of 49 elements includes some familiar names - iron, aluminium, copper, lead, silver. But examine them in detail and you realise almost all have serious drawbacks. We've got some very tough and durable elements on the left-hand side - titanium and zirconium, for example. The problem is they are very hard to smelt. You need to get your furnace up into the region of 1,C before you can begin to extract these metals from their ores.

That kind of specialist equipment wasn't available to ancient man. Aluminium is also hard to extract , and it's just too flimsy for coinage. Most of the others in the group aren't stable - they corrode if exposed to water or oxidise in the air.

Take iron. In theory it looks quite a good prospect for currency. It is attractive and polishes up to a lovely sheen. The problem is rust: unless you keep it completely dry it is liable to corrode away. We can rule out lead and copper on the same basis. Both are liable to corrosion. Societies have made both into money but the currencies did not last, literally.

Of the elements we are now down to just eight contenders: platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium, along with the old familiars, gold and silver.

These are known as the noble metals, "noble" because they stand apart, barely reacting with the other elements. They are also all pretty rare, another important criterion for a currency. Even if iron didn't rust, it wouldn't make a good basis for money because there's just too much of it around. You would end up having to carry some very big coins about. With all the noble metals except silver and gold, you have the opposite problem. Throughout the ages, monarchs, pirates, and merchants were always on the lookout for the next gold score they could attain through robbery, heavy taxes, or colonizing entire continents.

Even though some minerals today are more valuable than gold, nothing beats it in versatility, prestige, and aesthetic value. Platinum is much rarer and more expensive than gold, but it has fewer industrial uses. Also, because it looks like silver to the untrained eye, most people still prefer a gold watch over a platinum one. Gold has a captivating yellow glow that has been the cause of wars, trade blockades, and some of the most dramatic betrayals in human history.

Even though it would take a dissertation to explain them one by one, it is always interesting to study how humanity as a whole has become so seduced by the power of gold. As with any study relating to world history, it pays to start at the very beginning. How did gold become so valuable? How does the history of gold add value to you as a professional and a consumer?

The history of gold dates farther back than writing or pottery, so it is impossible to determine who to credit for its discovery. Khrysos , a child of Zeus in spirit form in Greek mythology, was immune to damage from rust and moths but could silently devour the minds of men whose thoughts he inhabited. The legend of Midas comes from a king who ruled over Greece in the 8th century BC. His queen, Damodice, was the inventor of coins, and numerous tales began to surround the two even after Greece prospered.

There have been lengthy debates about the archeological origin of gold. It is unknown which ancient civilization is responsible for its lofty state in modern culture, but most historians agree that late hominids first found gold in shallow streams. Before smelting and metallurgy, people took possession of gold in its natural state: As unwieldy yellow nuggets. With all of that said, this series of blog posts on gold will seek to explain why it is such a precious metal, by giving a history, discussing its properties, the mining and production process, the uses for gold, the top gold producing countries and lastly explain its role as a traded commodity.

People most likely first discovered gold in streams and rivers all over the world with its beauty and luster catching the eye. The known history of gold goes back a long way, so far back that, according to the National Mining Association , it was first used by cultures in modern day Eastern Europe in BC to make decorative objects.

Gold was generally used for a couple thousand years solely to create things such as jewelry and idols for worship. This was until around BC when the ancient empire of Egypt, which benefited greatly from its gold-bearing region, Nubia, made gold the first official medium of exchange for international trade.

Egypt created what was called the Shekel , a coin which weighed It was made from a naturally occurring alloy called electrum which was about two-thirds gold and one-third silver. It was also around this time that the Babylonians discovered a method called the fire assay, one of the most effective ways to test gold purity, which is still used to this day.

A few centuries later, around BC, the Egyptians discovered they could alloy gold with other metals in order to make it stronger and give it different color pigments. Egyptians also began experimenting at this time with a casting method called lost-wax casting in which a duplicate gold sculpture is cast from an original wax sculpture, a process that can be used to create wonderfully-intricate sculptures, so much so that it is also still used to this day.

A couple hundred years later, in Lydia, a kingdom in Asia Minor, the first minting of pure gold coins began around BC. This is where the gold chemical symbol of Au comes from to represent gold on the periodic table of elements. A little over a thousand years later, in AD, William the Conqueror of Normandy became the first Norman King of England, and with his conquest began a new metallic coin-based-system of currency in England. By , about one hundred years later, Great Britain issued its first gold coin, the Florin while across Europe in modern day Italy, the Republic of Florence issued the first gold Ducat , which soon became the most popular gold currency in the world and remained so for another five centuries.

In , the first U. Backtracking a bit to , a man named John Marshall found gold flakes in a stream in California, thus beginning the California Gold Rush. The California Gold Rush not only hastened the settlement of the American West, but it also was the basis for the classic computer game of which so many generations of Americans are fond, The Oregon Trail.

Clearly gold has a long and storied history of obsession for over 6, years. The interesting thing about gold is that for reasons unknown, its mysterious ability to attract people all over the world independently of each other allowed it to become a medium of exchange accepted anywhere in the world. At various points throughout history, gold coins were minted, however, many coins were not minted by any central authority, but were simply hammered by regular people.

This ability to make homemade coins, so to speak, that were accepted as legal tender made them irregularly shaped. Obviously, this homemade coinage was hard to regulate and a method called clipping was a common issue with gold and silver coins. The irregular shapes allowed people to clip small bits off of the coins and eventually accumulate enough to melt the bits down to create more coins. Unfortunately, the clipping of hammered coins made it so that the weight of the coin was less than the actual value of the coin making it no longer valuable tender, especially abroad.

Another issue was that the minted coins, which were protected from clipping by a special engraving, were easily counterfeited by casting with counterfeit molds or stamped with counterfeit dies. The Great Recoinage of was an attempt by the English Government to fix the issue with new minting technology, however, that was largely a failure. The complete history of gold would not be possible without a discussion on the gold standard. The gold standard was a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account, for example the U.

Dollar, was based on a fixed quantity of gold. With this monetary system, an individual holding some amount of paper money could go to a bank and exchange that money for a fixed amount of gold.