Here’s a commodity quotation listing unlike any other, guaranteed.
I’m applying heavy automation so that it should be easy to crunch all the math
and keep everything updated on a monthly basis.
These three dozen-plus goods fall roughly into three categories: scientific
marvels, legendary comestibles and personal care items, and aberrant
currencies. They range from surprisingly cheap to breathtakingly expensive.
Of the latter, some additional items beyond the ones that I’m able to
quote but will mention are, in fact, so elusive that they have no real
market and are therefore literally priceless. While others, like the
Vietnamese Dong, owe their curiosity value to being so
suffocatingly abundant.
The figures for most of the non-currency items reflect an average of the asking prices
of several parties1. They should be reasonably close for small, tabletop
quantities. Obviously if you decide to stock up on heavy water in 55-gallon
drums you could cut a better deal. Each graph displays the values for the
same given quantity so they’ll compare on an equal footing. To
approximate Euros for March 2010, multiply dollar
amounts by 0.73; for
Pounds Sterling, 0.64.
As different as these seven items are from one another, I'm listing them first because they
all come in at, effectively, under
$300 per troy ounce.
Uranium is normally bought, sold, and stored in the form of its chalky, yellow
oxide — better known as yellowcake. Back during the Beaver Cleaver era they used
to give bottles of the stuff away to tourists visiting the mines. The pure metal itself
is by far the cheapest superheavy substance which is the main reason the military craves
it for bullets and artillery shells. Unenriched uranium is mildly radioactive and
despite much hue and cry pretty safe unless it’s finely divided and inhaled.
Which, of course, during warfare, it is.
At $22.00
per 100 ml (3.4 oz) bottle, Manni extra virgin olive oil costs
3.20 times as much as
uranium and so far appears to be the world’s costliest. Maybe its
farmers sing to the trees. Chefs use Manni very sparingly but many insist
it’s worth it. Unfortunately for the more workaday product, terms like
“extra virgin” have no legal meaning in the US so you’ll
find just about any old crankcase sludge marketed here under that guise (heads up,
Rachael Ray).
Shilajit or shilajeet is a highly prized tar that seeps to the surface in the
Himalayas during summer thaw. It’s a traditional Nepali tonic and
cure-all. In 1870 British explorer Sir Martin Stanley reported that monkeys
living in the higher elevations where they could find and eat shilajit aged
much more slowly, Lost Horizons-like, than their brethren who did not.
Shilajit contains humic acids — large, complex molecules that arise from
plant decomposition. Studies to determine what beneficial effects it may
actually have are ongoing.
Heavy water or D2O is water made of the alternate stable isotope of
hydrogen called deuterium. It’s used to slow neutrons in some nuclear
reactors. D2O weighs 11% more than ordinary water and has slightly
higher melting and boiling points. It lies midway between ordinary water and
skim milk in viscosity, so although it doesn’t taste any different it
might conceivably feel a bit unusual in your mouth. Animal studies show that
restricting your fluid intake to 50% D2O or more would cause no end
of grief. Its chemical reactions run a bit slower so your body would have
difficulty dividing cells and repairing itself and would give up the ghost
before the week is out.
Molecule of Crocin, Chief Active Ingredient in Saffron
Top drawer saffron is actually more red than yellow. It consists exclusively
of the saffron crocus’s stigmas, not the stalks supporting them which,
like the brine they inject into supermarket chicken, add little more than dead
weight. Technicians grade saffron by how well it absorbs a 440 nanometer
wavelength of light, a deep violet-blue, resulting in a correspondingly high
reflectance at the other end of the spectrum, red. The best earns an ISO color
strength rating of 230-250. The spice’s chief active ingredient is
crocin, a deep red crystalline solid that’s also plentiful in gardenias.
Crocin shows powerful antioxidant and cancer-suppressing potential, so a
number of firms are investigating gardenias as a far
cheaper source.
You’d probably no more relegate 100-year-old balsamic vinegar to
a salad than you would pour Manni olive oil into a turkey fryer. The vinegar is very
syrupy with an intense, indescribably complex flavor at that stage.
Connoisseurs dollop it gingerly onto meat or fruit or just sip it straight
from shot glasses. Clans in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region have been
crafting the product which now includes
Il Grande Vecchio Mussini,
Modena Extraveccio,
and other brands for over a thousand years.
The red wines of Châteaux Lafleur, Le Pin, and Pétrus figure
prominently on most short lists of the world’s most exalted. Château
Pétrus was served at Queen Elizabeth’s wedding in 1947 and
became a favorite of the Kennedy White House. I’m tracking the price of
1982 Pétrus on my graph because it was a particularly good year and
because there’s plenty of it around to assure a sturdy market.
$213 per troy ounce approximates
$5200 a bottle.
The willingness of prospective customers to part with that kind of cash for something a
couple can drink inside of an hour depends entirely on how much they trust the people
who have warehoused it. You can infer something by the condition of the bottle’s label and the
size of the empty space inside the neck. If the latter (called “ullage”) extends
down too low, the cork hasn’t been doing its job and the wine
has probably gone bad.
When I was a kid I remember buying, from one of those coin operated
gumball-type machines, some big plastic capsules of folded up Brazilian
banknotes. No wonder, because for most of the 20th century Brazil was the
poster child of runaway inflation. Authorities had to hack off three zeros
four separate times and rename the currency seven times, such that one
modern Brazilian Real is now worth 2,749,025,730,000 (2.75 trillion US)
pre-1942 Brazilian Reis.
The Land of Xuxa now seems to have things well in hand, so meanwhile
here’s an up-to-date comparison (left) of the world’s five
tiniest currencies. Currently the Vietnamese Dong wins hands down at about 18700 to the Dollar. Look for them to
perform a zero-ectomy and innaugurate a New Dong any day now.
There is another currency with an exchange rate so horrific it would be useless for me to try to graph it here.
On 1 August 2008 the Zimbabwean Dollar traded at around 480,000,000,000 for the US variety. On that day they redefined it by removing ten zeros, making it 48 per USD.
That quelled things for a little while, but as of November 19 that year it had rocketed back to an even more fever dream-like 439,481,070,796,885,000. On
February 2 of this year the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe cut off another 12 zeros, but by that time most Zimbabweans had resorted to stronger, non-bushel-basket-stuffing lucre such as the South African rand.
Conversely, here are the world’s largest currencies. In case you’re
wondering, Seborga is a principality perched above the Italian Riviera
within sight of Monaco. Though many dismiss it as a pseudostate playing dress-up, its historical
precedents for sovereignty go back over a thousand years and its citizens
seem perfectly serious about it. Seborga earns its living exporting flowers
and offering its tourists and gourmandizers a better bargain
than Monaco.
Finally, here is some of the world’s least-known money. The
Mauritanian Ouguiya is one of the very few aside from the Scudo [below] not
divided decimally. Rather, 5 Khoums equal 1 Ouguiya.
Like Seborga, The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of
Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta or SMOM is a darling of micropatrologists
— that is, people who study tiny states. Dating from 1080,
the SMOM now exists primarily as a Catholic service organization. After
Napoleon defeated the SMOM’s navy and evicted it from Malta in 1798,
it ultimately set up shop in Rome as an “extraterritorial”
state. Its currency divides as follows: 6 Piccioli
= 1 Grano; 5 Grani = 1 Cinquina; 2 Cinquini =
1 Carlino; 2 Carlini = 1 Taro; and finally
12 Tarì = 1 Scudo. Negotiable or not, the SMOM’s
coins are exquisite and procedes from their sales go toward its many
humanitarian efforts.
Copper
$ 0.04839 (-9.3%)
Nickel
$ 0.00300 (+1.7%)
Zinc
$ 0.00105 (-13%)
Manganese
$ 0.00082 (-0.9%)
Dollar Coin Components
Long gone are the days when circulating coinage held substantial bullion
value. But what the heck. Here’s the current worth
of each of the four base metals in the new gold-colored US presidential
dollar coin. They total $0.05326 or 996 Dongs, down 9% from last month. That’s not
bad for a one dollar face value. The big money loser for the US mint
is the nickel, whose metal content alone now comes to about
$0.0488.
In 2004 the Austrian mint struck fifteen copies of a 1000-troy-ounce
24-karat gold “coin” picturing the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra hall on one side and violins, a harp, a French horn and a
bassoon on the other. Half the weight of a typical manhole cover, it
measures about 15 inches (37 cm) in diameter and 5/8 inches (1.5 cm)
thick. At current gold prices its bullion value would be
$1,093,400.
More recently Canada shattered that record with a one-off 99.999% pure 3215-troy-ounce (100 kg) gold coin. That makes it
the world’s largest, with a current value of around
$3.5 million.
Since gold of that fineness is so absurdly soft and pliable, such a heavy yet
skinny platter of it would be vulnerable to dents and gouges at the slightest
mishandling.
