Can Anybody Guess Roughly How Much Gold Is In Private Hands In India?

Currently gold costs between $1200 and $1400 per ounce to mine and refine, so there is a big profit in owning a gold mine. Many mines that were unprofitable are now profitable to reopen.

That's an impressive collection, hfjacinto!

I'm curious, though -- since most of your coins are graded, I'm assuming you consider them to be more "collectible" than purely bullion. Would you ever consider selling them at bullion prices, or are you thinking they will someday be worth more than that due to their numismatic value?

Personally, although I do have a decent number of non-bullion gold coins (such as St. Gauden's), I don't have any that are graded and slabbed since I did buy them essentially as bullion with the thought of selling them as such in the future some day.

Interesting discussion.

I misspoke earlier -- I actually do have two slabbed and graded gold coins that I purchased for my virtual type album:





When counting how many ounces of gold I own or calculating how much my gold collection I worth, I don't include these coins (or the other ones that are physically residing in the gold page of my 7070 album. I'm hoping to never sell any of those, preferring to hand them down to my son one day. All the rest, whether they be bullion coins, old "collectible" coins, or gold bars, were purchased as investments and if I ever decide to sell them it will be with the expectation of getting bullion prices for them.

Well... OK, even that is not entirely true. In addition to the gold coins in my 7070 album and the stuff I bought purely as bullion, I also have a limited number of items purchased directly from the U.S. Mint over the years at high premiums. Again, I consider those to be collectible and would prefer to leave them to my son some day, but if I ever needed to sell them (due to a medical emergency or the like), I would certainly like to get more than just spot price for them. Who knows whether that would actually be possible, though, especially if the price of gold keeps rising like this.

Just about any AI will give you roughly the same info. I happened to use perplexity. Grok and google do the same thing. Best thing is they are free to use so you can just keep rephrasing questions to finally get to what you'd like to know. AI is far from perfect but does work best with relatively hard facts.

I called up my Indian friend and we talked about this. There are several reasons for the hoarding of gold.
1) gold is portable. You can carry 4-5 ounces and buy a car. Many places take gold for large purchases.
2) it's easy to pass from generation to generation.
3) there was a disdain for the British currency and it carries through with rupees.
4) there is a certain amount of corruption that it's a good idea to have a portable solution for your assets.
5) tax avoidance
6) a dowry is expected and gold is an expected portion of the dowry.
7) the families are generational so your grandmothers, mothers and your gold are the families, it's all intermingled.
8) there is very little markup in gold even jewelry is sold for mostly the gold value.
9) the more you earn the more you gold you can get, hence that's why many Indian buy bullion in the U.S. as it has the cheapest markup.
10) he puts away about 10% of the family income to gold.

And I did ask, ever since the burglaries many families had commercial grade safes installed or safe rooms created to store the gold. The safe rooms are hidden and there is fake gold in areas the burglars might hit.

Well, I always say that I have no gold, but that is not entirely true. I have no numismatic nor numismatic-adjacent gold. I do have two gold rings—my class ring and my wedding band. So, I have some gold, but my gold is 100% held as jewelry.

I thought you had to declare jewelry purchased abroad when returning, to pay duties? If you really load up, the tax could be considerable.