re: Have you ever seen gold bars change hands for a business transaction

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How much is a gold bar worth?

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If you're thinking of the Fort Knox type of bar, those are nominally 400 Troy oz (though it can vary about 50 oz either way), so if it's nominal weight, at about $1200 an ounce, you're looking at roughly $500,000 a bar.

Of course, you can pour liquid gold into any bar shape you want, but that 400 oz bar is the largest of the bars that are commonly traded around.

I've handled a gold bar from the vault at Stuller, Inc. and it really is kind of otherworldly. I think the one they let us handle was something on the order of about 140 oz from what I remember of the stamping on the bar. I learned that day that gold bullion comes covered in stamps. It has the stamps of the assayers on it, it's got the bar's weight, it's got the bar's purity, it's got a serial number on it, it's got the place it was cast, and it's got the date of production. When it's traded, it typically only goes into bullion vaults that are special in that they have measures in place to ensure that gold stored in the vault is never tampered with. This way, I can buy gold bar number 3764 from TD Enterprises that is held in a gold vault in NYC and if I sell it to you, you can be sure that what's stamped on bar 3764 from TD Enterprises in that gold vault is still a reliable representation of what the bar really is. Once it leaves the custody chain of certified gold vaults, then it becomes subject to tampering and what's stamped on it can't be considered to be gospel anymore.

You get a real appreciation for how dense that stuff is when you start getting to that amount. You're just holding this thing that looks about the size of a few good sized Hershey's bars stacked together, it weighs ten pounds, and it's worth $150k. It's just freaky.

Because he doesn't take credit cards and I don't write checks.

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but that 400 oz bar is the largest of the bars that are commonly traded around.

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For large financial transactions, mostly governments. There are small gold bars that most people use and are far more common

1 gram - 1 kilo are quite common

This may be a stupid question, but here is goes....what makes gold the "gold standard"? In other words, why is everyone so sure that the price of gold is more stable than the american dollar if the american dollar is no longer tied to the price of gold?

Why do people opt to conduct shady transactions in gold rather than silver?

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Why do people opt to conduct shady transactions in gold rather than silver?

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Since we have valued gold for thousands of years, it is believed to be a more stable commodity. But all commodities are valued based on demand

I heard someone on TV a few years ago say that all the gold mined in history wouldn’t quite fill up 2 Olympic sized swimming pools. Seems low to me but I’m too lazy to research it.

All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else's name.

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Federal gold exchange or a bank. Every printed dollar is supposedly backed by equal value of gold, but I seriously doubt that.

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What is this, 1933? Every printed dollar is most certainly not backed, or even supposedly backed, by equal value of gold. It certainly hasn’t even had enough gold to even back foreign US currency holdings since 1970. That’s comical.

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Every printed dollar is supposedly backed by equal value of gold, but I seriously doubt that.

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Welcome to the 1930's..… We now have FIAT currency.