I'm not feeling very inspired this week, so I thought I'd pass along an excellent data set aggregated by Tim Green, author of The Ages of Gold (2007). Here's his book: http://shop.gfms.co.uk/acatalog/The_Ages_of_Gold2.html For the World Gold Council, Green assembled some statistics on central bank gold holdings and gold production, dating back to 1845. I think this is a fine resource for those with an interest in such things. Here it is: Tim Green's Central Bank Gold Dataset (in .pdf). From that, this is perhaps the most interesting graph:
This graph shows the migration out of gold coins and into paper banknotes, with gold reserves held by central banks. The same, expressed as percentages of total aboveground gold. I think the percentages are a little high.
Nathan Lewis
