A real gold debit (and credit?) card

chainsaw

Shopping in Curry's one day I caught the tail end of a show on one of the TV's.

The show discussed a debit card with a difference. Instead of depositing cash into your account you deposit gold. I guess you do this by buying gold from the card company rather than actually putting your own gold into an account.

When you go shopping and use the card to buy something for say £100, one hundred pounds will be deducted from the value of the gold held in your account.

The advantages of this is it enables you to actually spend some of the gold you own without having to sell gold first. Your gold investment could go up (or down) in value, you don't need to keep gold in your house and in a doomsday situation when paper money looses its value hopefully your gold would be safe.

As I missed most of the show I don't know if this was for the super rich or if people with just a few thousand could take part. I am not sure if I also heard that the US government was against this and fighting it as they feared it would become some sort on international currency.

I have since searched the net and been unable to find any mention of this anywhere. I realise this is not for everyone but its still an interesting idea.

Does anyone know anything about this

hermante

chainsaw wrote: »

The show discussed a debit card with a difference. Instead of depositing cash into your account you deposit gold. I guess you do this by buying gold from the card company rather than actually putting your own gold into an account.

When you go shopping and use the card to buy something for say £100, one hundred pounds will be deducted from the value of the gold held in your account.

Some banks in Hong Kong offer multi-currency accounts. For HSBC's basic one you only need HK$10000 min to avoid a monthly fee and one of their currencies is maces of gold.

You can use internet banking to move your money between any of the currencies and gold at any time, though unfortunately HSBC has the worst interbank rates in Hong Kong (but far better than anything you will get in the UK). Obviously the base currency for your cards is HKD, although you can also get cards in RMB.

Unless gold became the official currency of a country I don't think you would ever get a bank account or card denominated in gold. In any case, you'd never be able to spend it since that requires the merchant to also have a gold bank account. Otherwise every transaction you make will incur a foreign conversion fee and you'd be at the mercy of the bank's exchange rate (or even DCC!)