I just watched a YouTube video of the production of small gold bars in a Korean gold exchange. The final commercial product was a little gold piece in a laminated card. What has me baffled is that the standard weight of these gold pieces is 1.875 grams, like this. Bwuh?
1 7/8 grams seems like a strange unit of measurement; it doesn’t seem to line up with other units like grains (28.93) or ounces (0.0602 Troy or 0.0661 avoirdupois). I suppose 6/100 of a Troy ounce might be significant somehow. It’s 1/12 of 30 grams, if that’s important.
I see that there is a Pakistani tola that is 12.5 grams, so that’s 6.6666… of these 1.875 gram bars, but that doesn’t seem right either. There are historic Korean units of weight too, and maybe this fits into that system somehow, if it’s meant for the Korean market?
I note that gold today is $62 per gram and the bullion value of each 1 7/8 g bar is $116. They sell for $146, about a 25% increase. One ounce bars are asking about $2024 vs their spot value of $1960, only a 5% increase which is more in line with what I would expect.
That may be normal for smaller bars, I don’t know.
Dammit. I had a 5-gram “bar” I’d bought in Switzerland in 1977 as a souvenir. Back in the bad ol’ days when Americans couldn’t own bullion, they were popular because they were easy to smuggle. Alas, it was lost in a fire.
And speaking of troy ounces, I was at a gem and mineral show and a dealer had a silver bar on his counter, narrow side, with the markings, up. He said, "Pick that up and I’ll give it to you. It was 1,000 t oz and after a quick calculation it was somewhere over 65 pounds I said, “Nope. I could slide it over the edge and catch it from underneath but I’m assuming that not what you mean by ‘pick up.’” He just grinned.
I once read about a gold mine in South Africa that had a bar of gold on display in their office. They had a standing offer that they would give it away to anybody who could pick it up with one hand.
Stating everything in grams, as much as I hate to admit it, eliminates any confusion. Troy vs avoirdupois ounces is one part of the US system that should have been banished a long time ago.
Economies of scale, I suppose. The production and retail distribution of gold bars comes with fixed costs that affect, percentage-wise, smaller quantities more than larger ones.
In a Korean tv show, the lady was a landlord of some apartments, and apparently, every so often she go get an embossed gold bar about the size of a paperback book at a goldsmith, and they’d put it in a little crown royal style of bag and hand it to her and shed stash it in a safe because apparently a lot of the older generation didn’t trust the financial system …
