Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 August 30

= August 30 =

tooth whitening
In this article below, is it suggesting that tooth whitening is bad altogether or not hence the risks involved are the risks for everything tooth whitening related is my question? Baking soda and whitening toothpaste as a at home tooth whitening product is it all bad or am I not understanding it well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_whitening#Risks2001:8003:740C:FC00:950D:E213:E9D5:DFF2 (talk) 12:57, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It is not suggesting anything. It is stating known risks.  If you have concerns for yourself, please contact the proper medical professionals who can provide better answers than Wikipedia can.  -- Jayron 32 13:51, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

If most payments were in gold (instead of fractional fiat currency, barter etc), how much would gold cost?
There are so many money supplies like M0, MB, M1, M2, MZM, M3, M4-, M4 and L, I wouldn't know which would give the most accurate estimate of what the purchasing power of gold would be if the main money was gold (dividing the best M number by the 200,000 ton weight of already mined gold or a slightly higher ~250K which includes known reserves (in the mineral reserve sense) that'd be far more valuable, maybe already mined if fiat money didn't exist, 200 vs. 250 isn't a big difference anyway)Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:15, 30 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Do you mean the sum of the money supplies of all the world's countries added up together? I don't know if comparing this to the gold supply makes any sense. Do you imagine the gold as being physically moved from payer to payee, so that some payments need to be hauled in several truckloads? Or can the ownership be changed by flipping some bits on a disk, in which cash can be implemented as promissory notes, just like bank notes in the good(?) old days of the gold standard. Then what is the currency in which you wish to measure the purchasing power of your new currency? If it is US dollars, then today, to a first approximation, a kilogram of gold would buy you USD 58,500. --Lambiam 07:53, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * This from 2020.4 says there is $35.2 trillion worth of M1 narrow money in the world, if all the gold (200,000 tons*30,000 troy oz/ton*$1,800=$10.8T) had to do that job too and the contemporary world ended up similar except no narrow money (I don't know if that's economically possible) then presumably a quarter million dollars of the CPI basket here would cost about a kilogram there ($46 trillion/200MM), or a little less as more of the gold would've been dug out by now as that is $8,000 an ounce. It says M2 is worth $95.7 trillion which includes less liquid money like savings and money market accounts so if you literally deposited gold when adding to your savings account it might be worth half million per kilo. At some M you'd get into M's that have double counting. i.e. a certificate of deposit that was lent to a builder who bought lumber with it to build a house to sell to profit and pay you back. But your money is apparently both in the bank cause it'll pay you say next year and also in the account of at least one other entity. While in gold world (if a modern world could even evolve in spite of gold deflation, I don't know) the money could only be in one place at any one time, or 2 places if there's a gold banknote but to truly be gold world it'd be 100% backed and the paper would be destroyed if you trade it for gold, and none of that minimum redeem amount or countries only stuff. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:09, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Lambiam: Several truckloads? As an order of magnitude estimate, a truck lifts about 20 tons of material, and that much gold costs about a thousand million euros. Not many people or even companies make such huge payments.  – b_jonas 12:07, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not many, but Germany's annual contribution to the EU budget is more than 25 thousand million euros. --Lambiam 20:43, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Which would cost about 60 tons if M1 is the most accurate estimator and 30 tons if M2 is. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:23, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Let's bear in mind that under a pure gold standard there would only be cash (gold) in hand and what is stored in vaults and thus not immediately available for use. M-2 and other measures would not exist. DOR (HK) (talk) 17:54, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * So if I had x grams of gold in gold world, and it somehow ended up similar to the world of today despite the economy having to grow faster than the gold supply, then how much could I buy with it? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:24, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * 42. What else could it be? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:31, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * 42 what? Cars? Mice? Current US$ worth of CPI basket? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:53, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Presumably, this 42. --2603:6081:1C00:1187:89C:D19:9659:4A59 (talk) 03:31, 6 September 2021 (UTC)