If one replaces gold with crude oil then the gravity of this becomes clear.
What if Venezuela is smuggling its camouflaged crude oil inside Norwegian oil tankers?
What if Venezuela is smuggling its camouflaged crude oil inside Norwegian oil tankers?
How could any country be worse than Saudi Arabia?
To add to this, oil is a bit different in the simple fact that you need some level of skill to work in that industry and you're generally getting a livable wage (if not a very nice one) whereas gold mining in some countries is still done by what are effectively slaves (even by children).
Oil is very different depending on the origin. Some oils have more Sulphur, some oils have more tar-like parts. Some oil is very dark and some is almost transparent-yellow.
All these differences are fixed in distillation that separates the parts and removes the impurities, but not all distillation plants an handle all the types of oil.
Anyway, after distillation most people care only about the price.
But with oil that doesn't make sense because everyone is happy to buy from the Saudis, whose last scandal involved bone saws and acid vats.
It isn't helpful to the conversation to replace gold with oil.
Gold is extracted and usually refined locally, perhaps it is exported as an alloy with Silver or Platinum or other metal. After more refinement it can be converted to gold bars.
Oil has more variety, it's a mix of a hundred (thousand?) similar compound and it's exported (almost?) raw. So the composition and the level of the impurities vary a lot from the different sources. You can't ignore the source of the oil because your refinery may not be able to use it.
A better comparison is gasoline. The difference of gasoline with a bar of gold is that gasoline is still a mix of somewhat similar substances, but the variation is small. There are many variants, with different octane rating and different additives. It's not 100% true, but gasoline is somewhat fungible and you don't care too much about the origin if it has the quality you are looking for.
The Gold in this case is the exact same as the other gold it is reporting to be
This assumes the refinery isn't in on the fraud. If they are in on it they know what they are getting and there won't be a problem.
Of course I don't know the grades of oil from either place. (if I did know enough I'd probably not be allowed to talk about it...) It could be this substitution is fine for the refineries.
You can be sure refiners are testing before anything runs through the plant...
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crude_oil_products
So I don't see how you could economically camouflage crude oil from relatively simple chemical tests.
Let's say I manufacture a million widgets and can only sell one of them. HUGE excess.
Now let's say someone wants to buy a million widgets, but it takes me 3 weeks to build one. HUGE dearth.
> I hear rumors that there are exactly as many units of oil sold as units of oil bought
Gp compared the number of items sold with the number bought, not taking into consideration the number manufactured.
Just because it isn't being burnt up doesn't mean it's providing no utility.
It’s a simple thought experiment: what would the world look like if there were twice as much X, or half as much X, than there actually is?
For X=oil, there would be profound changes. Half as much would require a totally different looking economy. Twice as much would enable big changes.
For X=oil, nothing much changes. The industrial and decorative uses continue as they do now. The “store of wealth” uses just have a ~2x difference in $/kg compared to now.
Why does the price of gold continue to rise? Because enough people think they’ll be able to sell it for a good price later.
Edit: Annual world consumption of oil is about 100 million, so we have about 15000 years of reserves left. [2] That seems to me to be a glut.
1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-countries-most-oil-rese...
How long will current gold reserves last?
"World Oil Consumption measures the number of barrels that are consumed worldwide on an annual basis. It is an indicator released by BP. This metric tends to trend upwards except for a small dip in the 1980s and 2010. Interestingly enough, 2010 was also the time that Crude Oil prices plummeted because of supply and demand concerns."
15000 years. GLUT.
That /d means “per day.”
Your other link has the same figure. Or search “world oil consumption” and find a bazillion other sources all saying it’s per day.
This doesn’t even pass a basic smell test. That’s about 3 billion gallons. That’s about 10 gallons per American with the rest of the world getting nothing. Do you really think worldwide oil consumption is 10 gallons per American per year? The average American driver drives twelve thousand miles a year!