cassini

No, no typo in that line of mine you questioned as a typo - I was in ironic mode. As to bread being priced in gold, why yes you would have bought it with bronze for the same reason you don't proffer a £500 note to buy a bag of wine gums. Gold takes care of the large value items, silver takes care of the middling price items, bronze takes care of the trivial items like bread, milk, bags of sweets... A gold coin equivalent to say 1pence would be invisible so less precious metals are used to fill in. It doesn't actually need gold coins to circulate to operate some form of gold standard, as long as you can take your gold-backed notes along to a bank and request payment in specie then some form of restraint is placed on the operators of the system. It may even be possible to incorporate gold in notes as a foil strip. With gold at £1000/oz say, a fiver would contain 150mg of gold. Anyone doubting there was real gold in the notes could test it themselves with an acid test set for a few pounds, so they would be found out if they tried to put brass in there. Anyone trying to nick the gold strip would destroy the note.

I don't quite understand your point - are you saying that gold has some kind of intrinsic value that limits its use as money above a certain valuation? The intrinsic value of gold, whatever that is, has nothing to do with it. A paper dollar has no intrinsic value at all yet is accepted as money. Why do not people swap their valueless paper dollars, which you can't eat etc etc for some paper that is less expensive and overvalued...? Gold functions as money because it is durable, very difficult to fake, rare and hence unprintable except generally the supply increases from mines ~2.5%/annum, also it is divisible and all gold refined to the same standard is identical. These properties all make for a suitability for money. Diamonds are rare and expensive plus difficult to fake but are not divisible and all are slightly different from each other - not good as money. Gold would, if used as a 100% backing for the money supply, take on the value dictated by the amount of currency in the system, be that M2 or whatever, without reference to any value dictated by the cost of digging it out of the ground. I don't expect it would form a 100% backing so I don't expect it to rise to $50,000 but we're not so far off 10% of that for a fractional gold system. You could swap your paper for gold should you so wish, it may keep the pollies and bankers a little more hamstrung than they are now as they would need a minimum amount of gold to cover requests for specie instead of paper (De Gaulle requested payment from the US in gold instead of dollars in the late 60's as it became clear the dollar was overvalued relative to gold. Of course Nixon had to stop that so he 'closed the gold window').

Try HattonGardenMetals.com I have not used them in person but have bought off them by post. Also, someone on ADVFN, a long term member does use them in person and recommends them. I will say that they are only charging 6% over spot for sovereigns, less again, maybe only 3% over spot for Maples, Krugs. This used to be a standard figure for gold coins but for instance CoinsInvestDirect.com in Germany used to be cheap but I have seen premiums of 10.5% onsovereigns with them recently. I believe the front entrance is under another name, appearing as a jewellers? I don't know the address, their website must have it, along with a quote for coin prices for the am or pm fix. Try comparing their website price with whoever else you may use instead.