Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Scrooge McDuck Update

It would appear I was taking money, taking money money money, while Uncle McDuck was straight makin money, makin money money money. Hard at work studying, the MZA put his biznass school knowledge to work as follows:

ravi: i think your calculations are wrong
by my estimates the scrooge vault is about 120 feet by 80 feet by 100 feet
for a volume of 960,000 cubic feet
10:56 PM just trying to figure out how many gold coins could fit in one cufoot
then multiply by volume
to get troy volume weight of gold
thn reduce to about 80 % capacity
and multiply that number by weight of gold to get net worth of just his gold
remember he had gems also
10:57 PM me: 80? I'd say no more than 50%
he had to dive in, after all
ravi: yeah
80% would mean that there was about 80 feet of gold (the vault is 10 stories high
assuming 10 feet per story
50% full would be a 50 fot dive
and cartoon duck or not he's dead doing that
10:58 PM this guy made a scale model of the money bin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matsgull/sets/72157602185120037/
money bin is actually 12 stories tall
but i'm taking away the offices and other infrastructure
so assuming that 960K is the right number for voluyme
10:59 PM how do we calc th amount of coins in it
or would take to fill it
11:00 PM let's also assume that all coins are 1/10 oz sizes
which is about a dime (since he did spit them)
(dont think he could spit a full oz coin which is the size of a half dollaar)
me: so 1 coin is worth about $100
11:01 PM ravi: ok
so a dime is .70 inches in diameter and approximately .053 thick
11:02 PM that would mean in a 1 inch height
you could get about 18 dimes
so 214 dimes stack up to a foot
sorry 225
11:03 PM so cubing it
11:04 PM wait so 225 dimes is one foot tall and .705 inches wide
11:05 PM which means you could fit 17 stacks in one row
and about 17 columns as well
so 17*17*225=total dimes in 1 cubic foot
65025 dimes in 1 cu foot
11:06 PM multiplied by the value of 65025 oz of gold which at today's rate is
me: i'm just using $1000 on the high end
11:09 PM ravi: ok so it's $65 025 000 per cubit foot
multiplied by 960000
11:10 PM and taking 80% gives $4.99392 × 10^13 rate
which is pretty obscene
QED
11:11 PM or $4,993,920,000,000
but then again now we have to calculate it against what he paid for it
which given his ruthlessness is probably minimal
me: ha, he may have "discovered" a lot of it
11:12 PM ravi: but assuming it cost him 40%
it's a residual value of 2,996,352,000,000
and his tax rate is proably ridiculous
11:13 PM assume the govt takes 50%
he has a net worth of 1 498 176 000 000
11:14 PM in gold alone
11:17 PM me: that is nene
11:18 PM ravi: of HIGHLY liquid assets
i'll take my postulation/calculation of the year prize now kthx
11:23 PM i demand a correction on the review
me: i'll post it
11:25 PM well done
11:26 PM ravi: MBA money well spent
11:31 PM ravi: oh
wait
it's actually one MORE zero
so gold of 14 trillion dollars
11:32 PM which is almost 3.8X the amount of gold EVER mined

Touche, Mr. Mackey, touche.

5 comments:

  1. wow...nothing for over a month and then boom boom boom...

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  2. I don't understand these calculations at all. If he has $5 trillion worth of gold, then he has $5 trillion. You don't need to do any calculations based on what he paid for the gold. He has the gold. If I have a million dollars hidden under my mattress, then I have a million dollars, no further calculations necessary. If you're figuring out net worth, you only need to know assets and liabilities. His assets are $5 trillion worth of gold. His liabilities are unknown, so it's really irrelevant to this question.

    Of course, $5 trillion worth of gold is probably a huge percentage of the world's gold supply, so it's not a highly liquid asset. In other words, Scrooge probably couldn't just sell all his gold for $5 trillion because if he suddenly flooded the market with that much gold, the price of gold would fall significantly. (I think in fact that we're assuming that Scrooge has a secret supply of gold that is greater in fact than the current estimate of the total known world gold supply, so if Scrooge suddenly tried to sell all this gold, the gold market would likely collapse).

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  3. just to clarify, the calculations I'm taking issue with are the ones at 11:12 and 11:13

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  4. I'm not sure if this accurate, but here's an estimate of the world gold supply. 100,000 tons works out to a total worth of a little over $3 trillion for the entire world gold supply

    http://www.fgmr.com/gold.htm

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  5. These were pretty much all cocktail napkin calculations, so take it for what it is. After i calculated the value I realized that since he has so much control over the world's supply of gold, he can't really dump it anywhere so the value needed to be discounted for whatever would happen if he tried to sell it. He needs to follow the DeBeer's strategy of making it seem like the gold is a scarce resource and cash out to reduce his portfolio risk.

    However, he does have more vaults of gems, treasures and other sundries so I don't know what his balance sheet looks like in toto.

    Regardless, the moral of the story is that you have to diversify your bonds.

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