But I think there’s something else going on. This is to do with the billions of people that have recently been unleashed on the gold market, most especially in China, but with India and other emerging markets bringing up the rear.

These hoards of people are getting rapidly wealthier, most of them like gold, and they’re buying more of it. I recently wrote about this in “The 13 big things driving gold.” But since then I’ve been doing more digging and thinking.

Let’s look at how much gold each person would get if all the gold ever mined was shared equally across everyone in the world, and how that’s changed over time. I got historical gold stock figures from World Gold Charts, and population stats are easily available.