They claim that they've found $12 trillion worth of gold. That article was posted a few days ago, if the markets follow a logical consistency, then the value of gold should plummet dramatically. The estimate of the value of all the currently mined gold in the world is ~$3 trillion. Uganda claims to have discovered four times that amount. If you can increase the supply of something by four times, then the price of it should fall by almost as much. Right?
If. The markets are obviously skeptical this is true and/or extractible. Also the futures would dip before the actual price.
Yeah, that's the thing, innit? How long did folks blithely accept the numbers given out by Enron? There were a whole lotta red flags with that company before it ever went tits up, but nobody really questioned them for a long time. As well they should be. Regardless of what country made such a claim. Would they? I might be wrong in this, but it seems to me that there's been more than one event in the past 50 years where the market suddenly shat itself with no real advance warning.
Gold is always going to be valuable because of its beauty, it's chemical properties and malleability, but if it turns out that the supply has suddenly quadrupled, it's going to be interesting to see how this impacts its perceived value as an inflation hedge.
Wow. South Africa has diamonds, then Wakanda finds all that unobtainium, and now this. Is every country in Africa sitting on their own stockpile of $$$$ resources? Will Rwanda find out their entire mantle is platinum?