Minerva and Griphook weren’t surprised by the idea of taking raw gold and turning into coins. Presumably this happens sometimes; it’s not the case that all the Galleons in the world were first minted thousands of years ago. So how did the gold in the wizard economy get there in the first place? And what is the mechanism that prevents it now but didn’t prevent it then?
Are all wizards in the world unaware that Muggles possess gold at all? Surely not; Muggles probably own much more gold, and operate many more gold mines, than wizards do. If wizards ever went looking for un-mined gold, they’d encounter Muggle competition.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
Hypothesis: The muggles don’t possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
If most of the gold we think is in the Muggle economy is really in the wizarding economy, then wizards possess up to 170,000 tons of gold. 100,000 tons of gold divided between 1 million wizards is 100 Kg = 20,000 Galleons per wizard on average.
We actually observe that 100,000 galleons is a princely ransom and a rich fortune. Lord Malfoy is one of the richest people in Britain and he probably has on the order of a million Galleons. This seems compatible but somewhat unlikely; I would estimate less gold in the wizarding economy than 100,000 tons. And yet if they stole all the Muggle gold they’d have closer to 150,000 tons, not counting whatever they may have mined themselves.
Perhaps the only difference between fake gold and real gold is magical—if there’s a ritual that permanently transfigures a rock into gold, people can switch that with the gold in vaults. Of course, no one in the magical world would accept transfigured gold as payment.
And what about all the new gold the muggles mine, day by day? Wouldn’t that cause inflation in the wizard economy? And where does the swapped-out gold go?
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere.
When a muggle handles fake gold and it doesn’t work as a conductor, the Statue of Secrecy comes in and they get Obliviated and the gold gets swapped over so that it works properly.
If most Muggle gold is a clever Wizard fake, then the fakes are getting watched to ensure that those who handle the fake gold stay convinced that it’s real gold.
That’s an awful lot of surveillance. Would a spell which detects a Muggle trying to use jewelry/store of value gold for conduction and sounds an alarm be possible?
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods.
That is the first suggestion that would actually work. It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from. It’s less plausible than that they would care about the stability of the economy.
Besides, what magic can create, magic can destroy. People would invest serious effort in developing magic that would erase the “magical signature” of stolen gold if it would help them become billionaires.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all.
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Since money translates into power over others, Lucius too would always want more money.
It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from.
I don’t know. They have a fairly insular view of the world, but putting them on a par with animals seems to be a fringe notion, albeit one popular with those in power (ie purebloods.)
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Magical goods can be sold for money, and therefore are. You want a new broomstick? Pay up, bucko.
(Also, food is hard to create magically, according to canon, although God only knows how that works.)
“Right? You’re Muggles,” said the boy. He smiled twistedly. “You have as much standing in the magical British legal system as mice. No wizard is going to care about any arguments you make about rights, about fairness, they won’t even take the time to listen. You don’t have any power, see, so they don’t have to bother.”
Admittedly he was overstating it to make a point, but it’s still mostly true.
Perhaps wizards are superstitious and believe that stolen gold is cursed (or perhaps it actually is.) It’s a bit of a ridiculous explanation, but it’s not implausible that wizards would be easily susceptible to superstition or weird curses. And there are plenty of benefits of either spreading the rumor or creating actual curses, since they don’t like theft either. That it benefits muggles is just an accident, not their intention.
Are there notable instances of wizards stealing gold (or other precious objects) from other wizards and/or muggles? If there are, are any of them every cursed due to the inherent act of theft?
Nothing for gold that I recall, but Mundungus Fletcher stole a bunch of heirloom silverware and other such valuable things from Grimmauld place after Sirius died, and possibly even while he was alive, and didn’t seem to be particularly cursed, just throttled by Harry for disrespect to Sirius’s memory.
On the other hand with Sirius’s attitude towards his relatives he could easily have made a statement declaring his disinterest in his heritage that intentionally or unintentionally revoked his ownership over such items.
Fletcher is portrayed as a sketchy thief/fence pretty much from book 1, IIRC. It’s hard to imagine that so many people could have intentionally or not abandoned their magical ownership as to make such a career feasible.
He refers to cauldrons that “fell off the back of a broomstick”. Perhaps he meant it literally?
But no, he tells an amusing story about stealing toads from a fellow thief and selling them back to him. It’s clear that their relationship is built on selling each other things they “nicked”.
“Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods”
This makes a lot of sense. In a society where theft from even most wizards should be theoretically pretty easy, blanket ‘anti-theft’ measures seem most workable. Which, of course, implies that ownership is an intrinsic property of matter in the wizarding verse. Ayn Rand would squee.
Alternative; HPMOR is a sometimes a sideways critique of the Rowling universe, and should, perhaps, sometimes be viewed in that light.
Rowling’s universe does have poor wizards, and it does have money and currency constraints. Gold seems to be both intrinsically valuable and rare which is strange. There do seem to be strong cultural taboos against interaction with muggles, despite the obvious benefits (gold, sex, etc.) But the origin of those taboos have never been adequately explained. Such an explanation might allow for a Voldemort who was guided by something other than a quest for personal power, but who was some matrix-esque control mechanism from Atlantis. But I don’t want to get too Deus Ex Maquina in my explanations if something better presents itself. In any case, the taboos could easily be outdated. The existence of long-lived wizards suggests a larger ratio of old people to young, and a more conservative society (as in ‘resistant to change’) in general.
Alternately perhaps Harry’s experiment regarding inheritance was wrong or inadequate in some way and magic really can be diluted by interacting/breeding with muggles. We’ve been told that the most powerful wizards tend to have few children. Grindelwald seems to have been Gay. Dumbledore is both Gay and childless/asexual in his adult life. If we assume a given number of Atlantean ‘magic markers’ (genetic markers which confer magic ability, which is what a strict Mendelian wizarding gene is likely to be ;-) ) then perhaps having a larger number of a particular marker in a population really WOULD decrease the average power of anyone else who held one of those markers. This would allow for the cultural evolution of a wizarding world that was strongly insular, since familiarity breeds children and indiscriminate genetic dispersal would lead to collapse or diminishment of that family’s wizarding powers.
Which suggests that either Neville has a lot of distant relatives somewhere, or remarkable magical potential.
Well, in canon you need to pay for food—although it’s mentioned that you can cast enlarging charms o food you already have. Aaand … that’s kinda it. Water, free. Shelter free. Furniture, free.. Transport, free. Magical artifacts, to be fair, will cost you somewhat, so entertainment, medicine (is it mentioned if St. Mungos is public healthcare?), and certain conveniences (owls, broomsticks, floo powder …) will require a least intermittent income, but I would say an unemployed wizard is still quite comfortable compared to a muggle. And most magic items will last for years or decades, judging by the Weasleys.
Maybe the goblins have established some sort of monopoly on Galleon production, and regulate the amount of it that may be produced in one year? Plausibly the wizards might support that kind of a monopoly to prevent rampant inflation and destabilization of the economy.
Even if their knowledge of economics hadn’t caught up with muggles and they were still thinking in mercantilist terms (and so didn’t properly understand the concept of inflation), they could still understand that things will remain more stable that way. There have always been monopolies on the production of the official currency, with counterfeiters being harshly punished, and the (guild-like) goblins controlling it would fit with the general “old-fashioned” nature of the wizarding world.
If the goblins allow wizards to bring in gold to be minted, as Griphook told Harry, then how would they decide what wizards to work with? Every wizard can steal an effectively unlimited amount of gold from Muggle vaults. If many wizards did so, and then the goblins refused to turn most of that gold into Galleons, this would probably act to break their monopoly as a market in gold and/or other coins naturally emerged.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Why? There are vast advantages in using the currency that everyone else accepts. Real-world alternative currencies rarely replace the official national currencies, either. (Even if you believed that Bitcoin had the potential to eventually do so, gold and Galleons are both physical currencies, so gold wouldn’t have the advantages of a digital cryptocurrency.)
Muggles have never agreed not to value gold, even though vastly more money exists in non-gold-backed currencies today. Which is why those gold vaults still exist.
On the other hand, the main reason Muggles value gold is for jewelry, and it’s more likely that wizards use magic to substitute.
But, again, the fact is that Griphook agrees to convert gold into Galleons at only 5% overhead. So even if a wizard only values Galleons, he’ll want to acquire gold and give it to Griphook.
Griphook says earlier in the fic that “only a fool would trust anything other than goblin stamped galleons”, or words to that effect. So maybe wizards are free to trade gold with Muggles, but raw gold is easy to fake, so nobody is interested in raw gold, and only galleons are valuable. The goblins will stamp some galleons for you for a fee, but they don’t want to hyper-inflate the economy so they only do small batches. Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try. Or have I missed something?
Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try.
I think you’re onto something. Specifically, in the books, Goblins possess magic metalworking techniques wizards don’t know how to duplicate—and they know how to detect them. (It’s a point of contention as part of the whole “give us wands” thing.)
What if the Galleons are actually fake gold created by Goblins, and they can tell ‘fake’ currency because it’s real?
You’re suggesting that there are two substances, difficult to tell apart, both called “gold”. On what grounds does one decide which to think of as “the real thing” and which to think of as “an imitation of the real thing”?
On the grounds that if the goblins can tell them apart, there must be some difference. Remember, something doesn’t need to have a physical use to have value—see Bitcoin, or intellectual property, or stock options. Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
“If people decide to value it” makes that a tautology. Leaving that aside, scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. The only surviving painting by a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci of little renown will be valued, but less than one by Leonardo.
Silver has two stable isotopes, in roughly equal proportions. I doubt there’s much monisotopically refined silver in the world. It would cost more to make it, but it wouldn’t be worth more, unless someone wanted some that badly for a practical purpose.
As phrased it’s tautological, but my point was the implication—people can choose to value whatever they want, value is not intrinsic to an item. Lack of scarcity does provide an upper cap, though—air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth—so if people have chosen to value something, then scarcity is the remaining factor needed for it to have value. (I phrased it poorly, but I think it’s still strictly correct)
air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth
Actually, some cities have featured “air stations” or “air bars” due to smog, historically. I don’t know if they still exist, I haven’t heard of a contemporary one.
But which is “real” and which is “fake”? “Real” and “fake” are not objective properties of things. If only goblins can tell the two golds apart, why would anyone care? For practical purposes, for everyone else except Harry Potter there would just be “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 1” and “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 2″. Harry would be trying to find out what objective properties distinguish them.
The goblins are the central bankers of the wizarding world. They are entrusted with providing a reasonable money supply, and they’re free to use methods of their choice to create that(well, subject to assorted speciesist laws). I don’t care why the Federal Reserve says to use cotton money instead of plastic, as long as they run the money supply sufficiently well that I trust them.
I don’t believe that goblins’ magical power could outsmart that of wizards in this way. Particularly with the emphasis on wizards having access to wands and spells.
But then goblins would still want wizards to bring in real gold for “minting”. And wizards would still steal or trade for all the Muggle gold to give to goblins, and billions of Galleons would be circulating as a result. And we don’t observe that.
But does the Ministry—who are the ones with aurors—want muggles wondering why there’s so little gold nowadays? Not to mention the sudden rich people messing up the established power balance.
Again, why would the Ministry not take the gold for themselves instead of guarding it for the Muggles? Note that the explanation has to hold across all of recorded history, in many nations and times.
Why would the Ministry do that? I’m kind of drawing a blank here. Sure, the Magical government (maybe not the Ministry, since you can be fined for breaking the statute of secrecy) could probably pull it off (although it would have all sorts of repercussions.) But … I’m having a hard time imagining them doing so.
Honestly, can you imagine a Muggle government doing something like that? I mean, it’s not perfectly analogous, but I’d say your average army could fill in for magic here.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a bit more plausible, I have to admit.
And yet … still very hard. Unless you’re already really really rich? I guess?
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
It used to be that governments would debase their coinage whenever they needed money. Today, of course, we’re all taught that constant inflation is good for us.
Which, while admittedly very annoying to those poor suckers who already possess money, is rather different to launching a strike team to physically empty bank vaults.
Everyone does what they can. There have been many incidencts when Muggle governments expropriated privately owned gold (or other riches). They wouldn’t do it to themselves, of course, so the central bank vaults remained safe.
But the point is, only the arbiters of ultimate power (or their clients) can be truly rich; if anyone else is richer than they are, they will tend to take the riches by force. In the HP-verse, wizards have the ultimate power.
Except wizards don’t view themselves as the “arbiters of ultimate power” over the Muggles. Statute of Secrecy.
Now Voldemort, I admit, would probably have done something like this once he took power. Or Grindelwald. But neither of them won, so… manifestly, no wizard has successfully seized power to rule over the Muggles (except maybe waay back and it got covered up) because the SoS is still a thing.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
My guess is that they actually do care, if only because they don’t want Muggles getting too suspicious.
But yes, minor rights violations probably go on; the books note that dosing a muggle you have a crush on with love potion is seen as romantic.
Serious problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production = 2700 metric tons annually produced today. If there are one million wizards in the world, it takes 1000 tons of gold to have one kilogram of gold / 200 Galleons per person (~$50K at today’s prices). Or they have to produce a ton a year for a thousand years. How much gold was in pre-industrial e.g. Aztec civilization?
That’s a good point. I also add that Wikipedia says that:
A total of 174,100 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, according to GFMS as of 2012.
But still, if just a few wizards stole appreciable fractions of the Muggle gold vaults, they would be individually very rich. The same 1000 tons of gold would be a (ETA fixed calculation) 200 million Galleon fortune if owned by one wizard. Therefore, the question is how much gold is concentrated in one place (already mined) and available for stealing.
Wikipedia provides a list of officially reported gold holdings by country. The top few are: US, 8133 tons; Germany, 3391 tons; IMF, 2814 tons; Italy, 2451 tons; France, 2435 tons.
But where is the gold physically kept? Well, Wikipedia says that Fort Knox holds 4578 tons of gold. In any case, a wizard could Apparate to people, ask them where most of the gold is (Legilimency/Veritaserum/Imperius), Memory-Charm to erase the few minutes of the encounter, and Apparate away. If the person doesn’t know where the gold is, they can tell you who does know. Start with someone like a bank CEO, unlikely to have magical protection (unlike heads of state), and work your way on—in a day or two you’ll find the gold.
How do we know this hasn’t actually happened? The gold in the bank vaults may not be actually there. But the wizarding economy doesn’t have a known history of occasional sudden billionaires. Lucius probably never even heard about fortunes of more than a few million Galleons.
There’s another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed—that’s actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It’s open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn’t have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn’t vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
Possibly, but why couldn’t it have happened prior? There was plenty of gold around in the ancient world, and not enough of it got stolen. Nor is enough sitting in the wizarding economy.
Muggle society could hire wizards to punish thieves.
Wizards would know more muggles personally.
Maybe there really were fortunes made in those days, and it was covered up on our end. (Small fortunes, because muggles hadn’t had time to mine as much gold?)
It doesn’t matter that much if some wannabe thieves get caught. Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear. An alarm isn’t enough against several wizards who take the time to prepare a raid. Only a round the clock guard would be enough. If Aurors guard all the big Muggle gold vaults (or that the goblins or their dragons do), that might be a sufficient deterrent.
What isn’t clear is why they would install alarms or provide guards, instead of just taking the gold themselves.
Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear.
Well, if it’s an unusual idea to start with, and hard to hide—I mean, if you don’t get suddenly and suspiciously rich, what’s the point? - and most people get filtered out because their brilliant and original plan was actually anticipated (remember, the whole point of stealing from muggles is that they wont have magical protections) … I can see it being pretty much a non-starter.
Also, is that actually true? I mean, there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in, and so on. Heck, would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often, to the point that the majority of Earth’s gold was lost that way?
there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often
A thief could still succeed once. That we still use vaults indicates a thief has never succeeded. There’s still something to explain.
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
Funnily enough, it occurred to me that I have no idea if any such cases have occurred. I still don’t, because all the top Google hits seem to be conspiracy theories or something about how various gold reserves are totally empty. (Maybe a coverup would actually be possible with magic? Hmm … Fort Knox hasn’t been audited in 60 years, supposedly, so who knows?)
But honestly, who cares if you’re the “richest wizard in the world” if you’re in jail and your “wealth” is an unspendable stolen asset (remember, raw gold needs to be converted into coins)?
A thief could still succeed once.
Yeah, I just meant that muggles wouldn’t actually lose all the gold. It’s a moot point, since clearly this hasn’t happened either way.
A little digging suggests less than a thousand tons. Most of the metal wealth extracted by the Spanish empire was in the form of silver, not gold. The spanish were able to mine about a ton a year from hispanola for some unknown period, and the inca paid a ransom of 24 tons for their king.
Minerva and Griphook weren’t surprised by the idea of taking raw gold and turning into coins. Presumably this happens sometimes; it’s not the case that all the Galleons in the world were first minted thousands of years ago. So how did the gold in the wizard economy get there in the first place? And what is the mechanism that prevents it now but didn’t prevent it then?
Are all wizards in the world unaware that Muggles possess gold at all? Surely not; Muggles probably own much more gold, and operate many more gold mines, than wizards do. If wizards ever went looking for un-mined gold, they’d encounter Muggle competition.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
Hypothesis: The muggles don’t possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
If most of the gold we think is in the Muggle economy is really in the wizarding economy, then wizards possess up to 170,000 tons of gold. 100,000 tons of gold divided between 1 million wizards is 100 Kg = 20,000 Galleons per wizard on average.
We actually observe that 100,000 galleons is a princely ransom and a rich fortune. Lord Malfoy is one of the richest people in Britain and he probably has on the order of a million Galleons. This seems compatible but somewhat unlikely; I would estimate less gold in the wizarding economy than 100,000 tons. And yet if they stole all the Muggle gold they’d have closer to 150,000 tons, not counting whatever they may have mined themselves.
… and Eliezer raised the value of Galleons significantly for this fic. Hmm...
What Wizards even know that electrical conductivity is a thing?
Perhaps the only difference between fake gold and real gold is magical—if there’s a ritual that permanently transfigures a rock into gold, people can switch that with the gold in vaults. Of course, no one in the magical world would accept transfigured gold as payment.
And what about all the new gold the muggles mine, day by day? Wouldn’t that cause inflation in the wizard economy? And where does the swapped-out gold go?
Alternately: The wizards already mined all the real gold too.
It’s like bitcoin mining—whoever steals Muggle gold first gets to keep it. Of course that’s the Americans.
Harry’s going to be disappointed when he gets muggle rich, and Gringottts rejects all his muggle gold
When a muggle handles fake gold and it doesn’t work as a conductor, the Statue of Secrecy comes in and they get Obliviated and the gold gets swapped over so that it works properly.
If most Muggle gold is a clever Wizard fake, then the fakes are getting watched to ensure that those who handle the fake gold stay convinced that it’s real gold.
That’s an awful lot of surveillance. Would a spell which detects a Muggle trying to use jewelry/store of value gold for conduction and sounds an alarm be possible?
Well, it’s magic. Meaning ‘If the author wants it to be’.
That’s not what it means in this fic.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
That is the first suggestion that would actually work. It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from. It’s less plausible than that they would care about the stability of the economy.
Besides, what magic can create, magic can destroy. People would invest serious effort in developing magic that would erase the “magical signature” of stolen gold if it would help them become billionaires.
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Since money translates into power over others, Lucius too would always want more money.
I don’t know. They have a fairly insular view of the world, but putting them on a par with animals seems to be a fringe notion, albeit one popular with those in power (ie purebloods.)
Magical goods can be sold for money, and therefore are. You want a new broomstick? Pay up, bucko.
(Also, food is hard to create magically, according to canon, although God only knows how that works.)
Admittedly he was overstating it to make a point, but it’s still mostly true.
Perhaps wizards are superstitious and believe that stolen gold is cursed (or perhaps it actually is.) It’s a bit of a ridiculous explanation, but it’s not implausible that wizards would be easily susceptible to superstition or weird curses. And there are plenty of benefits of either spreading the rumor or creating actual curses, since they don’t like theft either. That it benefits muggles is just an accident, not their intention.
Are there notable instances of wizards stealing gold (or other precious objects) from other wizards and/or muggles? If there are, are any of them every cursed due to the inherent act of theft?
Nothing for gold that I recall, but Mundungus Fletcher stole a bunch of heirloom silverware and other such valuable things from Grimmauld place after Sirius died, and possibly even while he was alive, and didn’t seem to be particularly cursed, just throttled by Harry for disrespect to Sirius’s memory.
On the other hand with Sirius’s attitude towards his relatives he could easily have made a statement declaring his disinterest in his heritage that intentionally or unintentionally revoked his ownership over such items.
Fletcher is portrayed as a sketchy thief/fence pretty much from book 1, IIRC. It’s hard to imagine that so many people could have intentionally or not abandoned their magical ownership as to make such a career feasible.
He refers to cauldrons that “fell off the back of a broomstick”. Perhaps he meant it literally?
But no, he tells an amusing story about stealing toads from a fellow thief and selling them back to him. It’s clear that their relationship is built on selling each other things they “nicked”.
You mean, aside from Bacon’s diary?
“Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods”
This makes a lot of sense. In a society where theft from even most wizards should be theoretically pretty easy, blanket ‘anti-theft’ measures seem most workable. Which, of course, implies that ownership is an intrinsic property of matter in the wizarding verse. Ayn Rand would squee.
Alternative; HPMOR is a sometimes a sideways critique of the Rowling universe, and should, perhaps, sometimes be viewed in that light.
Rowling’s universe does have poor wizards, and it does have money and currency constraints. Gold seems to be both intrinsically valuable and rare which is strange. There do seem to be strong cultural taboos against interaction with muggles, despite the obvious benefits (gold, sex, etc.) But the origin of those taboos have never been adequately explained. Such an explanation might allow for a Voldemort who was guided by something other than a quest for personal power, but who was some matrix-esque control mechanism from Atlantis. But I don’t want to get too Deus Ex Maquina in my explanations if something better presents itself. In any case, the taboos could easily be outdated. The existence of long-lived wizards suggests a larger ratio of old people to young, and a more conservative society (as in ‘resistant to change’) in general.
Alternately perhaps Harry’s experiment regarding inheritance was wrong or inadequate in some way and magic really can be diluted by interacting/breeding with muggles. We’ve been told that the most powerful wizards tend to have few children. Grindelwald seems to have been Gay. Dumbledore is both Gay and childless/asexual in his adult life. If we assume a given number of Atlantean ‘magic markers’ (genetic markers which confer magic ability, which is what a strict Mendelian wizarding gene is likely to be ;-) ) then perhaps having a larger number of a particular marker in a population really WOULD decrease the average power of anyone else who held one of those markers. This would allow for the cultural evolution of a wizarding world that was strongly insular, since familiarity breeds children and indiscriminate genetic dispersal would lead to collapse or diminishment of that family’s wizarding powers.
Which suggests that either Neville has a lot of distant relatives somewhere, or remarkable magical potential.
I think that most people can’t do that.
Well, in canon you need to pay for food—although it’s mentioned that you can cast enlarging charms o food you already have. Aaand … that’s kinda it. Water, free. Shelter free. Furniture, free.. Transport, free. Magical artifacts, to be fair, will cost you somewhat, so entertainment, medicine (is it mentioned if St. Mungos is public healthcare?), and certain conveniences (owls, broomsticks, floo powder …) will require a least intermittent income, but I would say an unemployed wizard is still quite comfortable compared to a muggle. And most magic items will last for years or decades, judging by the Weasleys.
Maybe the goblins have established some sort of monopoly on Galleon production, and regulate the amount of it that may be produced in one year? Plausibly the wizards might support that kind of a monopoly to prevent rampant inflation and destabilization of the economy.
Even if their knowledge of economics hadn’t caught up with muggles and they were still thinking in mercantilist terms (and so didn’t properly understand the concept of inflation), they could still understand that things will remain more stable that way. There have always been monopolies on the production of the official currency, with counterfeiters being harshly punished, and the (guild-like) goblins controlling it would fit with the general “old-fashioned” nature of the wizarding world.
If the goblins allow wizards to bring in gold to be minted, as Griphook told Harry, then how would they decide what wizards to work with? Every wizard can steal an effectively unlimited amount of gold from Muggle vaults. If many wizards did so, and then the goblins refused to turn most of that gold into Galleons, this would probably act to break their monopoly as a market in gold and/or other coins naturally emerged.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Why? There are vast advantages in using the currency that everyone else accepts. Real-world alternative currencies rarely replace the official national currencies, either. (Even if you believed that Bitcoin had the potential to eventually do so, gold and Galleons are both physical currencies, so gold wouldn’t have the advantages of a digital cryptocurrency.)
Muggles have never agreed not to value gold, even though vastly more money exists in non-gold-backed currencies today. Which is why those gold vaults still exist.
On the other hand, the main reason Muggles value gold is for jewelry, and it’s more likely that wizards use magic to substitute.
But, again, the fact is that Griphook agrees to convert gold into Galleons at only 5% overhead. So even if a wizard only values Galleons, he’ll want to acquire gold and give it to Griphook.
What if the Galleons are actually fake gold created by Goblins, and they can tell ‘fake’ currency because it’s real?
That way, only the Goblins can test for ‘real’ vs. ‘fake’ currency because the wizards all have it backwards.
Griphook says earlier in the fic that “only a fool would trust anything other than goblin stamped galleons”, or words to that effect. So maybe wizards are free to trade gold with Muggles, but raw gold is easy to fake, so nobody is interested in raw gold, and only galleons are valuable. The goblins will stamp some galleons for you for a fee, but they don’t want to hyper-inflate the economy so they only do small batches. Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try. Or have I missed something?
I think you’re onto something. Specifically, in the books, Goblins possess magic metalworking techniques wizards don’t know how to duplicate—and they know how to detect them. (It’s a point of contention as part of the whole “give us wands” thing.)
You’re suggesting that there are two substances, difficult to tell apart, both called “gold”. On what grounds does one decide which to think of as “the real thing” and which to think of as “an imitation of the real thing”?
On the grounds that if the goblins can tell them apart, there must be some difference. Remember, something doesn’t need to have a physical use to have value—see Bitcoin, or intellectual property, or stock options. Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
“If people decide to value it” makes that a tautology. Leaving that aside, scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. The only surviving painting by a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci of little renown will be valued, but less than one by Leonardo.
Silver has two stable isotopes, in roughly equal proportions. I doubt there’s much monisotopically refined silver in the world. It would cost more to make it, but it wouldn’t be worth more, unless someone wanted some that badly for a practical purpose.
As phrased it’s tautological, but my point was the implication—people can choose to value whatever they want, value is not intrinsic to an item. Lack of scarcity does provide an upper cap, though—air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth—so if people have chosen to value something, then scarcity is the remaining factor needed for it to have value. (I phrased it poorly, but I think it’s still strictly correct)
Neither air nor water are scarce on Earth; but clean air and clean water have value.
Actually, some cities have featured “air stations” or “air bars” due to smog, historically. I don’t know if they still exist, I haven’t heard of a contemporary one.
But which is “real” and which is “fake”? “Real” and “fake” are not objective properties of things. If only goblins can tell the two golds apart, why would anyone care? For practical purposes, for everyone else except Harry Potter there would just be “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 1” and “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 2″. Harry would be trying to find out what objective properties distinguish them.
Fake in the sense that Goblins claim that gallons are made from raw gold, when they actually aren’t.
The goblins are the central bankers of the wizarding world. They are entrusted with providing a reasonable money supply, and they’re free to use methods of their choice to create that(well, subject to assorted speciesist laws). I don’t care why the Federal Reserve says to use cotton money instead of plastic, as long as they run the money supply sufficiently well that I trust them.
I don’t believe that goblins’ magical power could outsmart that of wizards in this way. Particularly with the emphasis on wizards having access to wands and spells.
Also: why would goblins do this?
Because the goblins don’t like having real gold go out of their hands.
But then goblins would still want wizards to bring in real gold for “minting”. And wizards would still steal or trade for all the Muggle gold to give to goblins, and billions of Galleons would be circulating as a result. And we don’t observe that.
’cause it can be turned into money, so they would want it, so it would be valuable.
I suspect anyone bringing in such a large pile of gold would be immediately arrested, or at least investigated, unless they had a damn good story.
Why? The goblins take a percentage for the minting, so they want the minting to go ahead.
But does the Ministry—who are the ones with aurors—want muggles wondering why there’s so little gold nowadays? Not to mention the sudden rich people messing up the established power balance.
Again, why would the Ministry not take the gold for themselves instead of guarding it for the Muggles? Note that the explanation has to hold across all of recorded history, in many nations and times.
Why would the Ministry do that? I’m kind of drawing a blank here. Sure, the Magical government (maybe not the Ministry, since you can be fined for breaking the statute of secrecy) could probably pull it off (although it would have all sorts of repercussions.) But … I’m having a hard time imagining them doing so.
Honestly, can you imagine a Muggle government doing something like that? I mean, it’s not perfectly analogous, but I’d say your average army could fill in for magic here.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a bit more plausible, I have to admit.
And yet … still very hard. Unless you’re already really really rich? I guess?
Well, maybe via war...
Nope, sometimes the government just steals everyone’s gold.
That … doesn’t seem like a great example.
It used to be that governments would debase their coinage whenever they needed money. Today, of course, we’re all taught that constant inflation is good for us.
Which, while admittedly very annoying to those poor suckers who already possess money, is rather different to launching a strike team to physically empty bank vaults.
Everyone does what they can. There have been many incidencts when Muggle governments expropriated privately owned gold (or other riches). They wouldn’t do it to themselves, of course, so the central bank vaults remained safe.
But the point is, only the arbiters of ultimate power (or their clients) can be truly rich; if anyone else is richer than they are, they will tend to take the riches by force. In the HP-verse, wizards have the ultimate power.
Except wizards don’t view themselves as the “arbiters of ultimate power” over the Muggles. Statute of Secrecy.
Now Voldemort, I admit, would probably have done something like this once he took power. Or Grindelwald. But neither of them won, so… manifestly, no wizard has successfully seized power to rule over the Muggles (except maybe waay back and it got covered up) because the SoS is still a thing.
My guess is that they actually do care, if only because they don’t want Muggles getting too suspicious.
But yes, minor rights violations probably go on; the books note that dosing a muggle you have a crush on with love potion is seen as romantic.
Serious problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production = 2700 metric tons annually produced today. If there are one million wizards in the world, it takes 1000 tons of gold to have one kilogram of gold / 200 Galleons per person (~$50K at today’s prices). Or they have to produce a ton a year for a thousand years. How much gold was in pre-industrial e.g. Aztec civilization?
That’s a good point. I also add that Wikipedia says that:
But still, if just a few wizards stole appreciable fractions of the Muggle gold vaults, they would be individually very rich. The same 1000 tons of gold would be a (ETA fixed calculation) 200 million Galleon fortune if owned by one wizard. Therefore, the question is how much gold is concentrated in one place (already mined) and available for stealing.
Wikipedia provides a list of officially reported gold holdings by country. The top few are: US, 8133 tons; Germany, 3391 tons; IMF, 2814 tons; Italy, 2451 tons; France, 2435 tons.
But where is the gold physically kept? Well, Wikipedia says that Fort Knox holds 4578 tons of gold. In any case, a wizard could Apparate to people, ask them where most of the gold is (Legilimency/Veritaserum/Imperius), Memory-Charm to erase the few minutes of the encounter, and Apparate away. If the person doesn’t know where the gold is, they can tell you who does know. Start with someone like a bank CEO, unlikely to have magical protection (unlike heads of state), and work your way on—in a day or two you’ll find the gold.
How do we know this hasn’t actually happened? The gold in the bank vaults may not be actually there. But the wizarding economy doesn’t have a known history of occasional sudden billionaires. Lucius probably never even heard about fortunes of more than a few million Galleons.
There’s another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed—that’s actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It’s open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn’t have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn’t vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
I think that a lot of the Hogwarts Founders and Merlin stuff was actually setting things up so stuff like this wouldn’t happen.
Possibly, but why couldn’t it have happened prior? There was plenty of gold around in the ancient world, and not enough of it got stolen. Nor is enough sitting in the wizarding economy.
The statute of secrecy also didn’t exist back then.
What are the relevant implications of that? I’m not coming up with any.
Muggle society could hire wizards to punish thieves.
Wizards would know more muggles personally.
Maybe there really were fortunes made in those days, and it was covered up on our end. (Small fortunes, because muggles hadn’t had time to mine as much gold?)
Hypothesis: Aurors simply put alarm spells in large repositories of gold.
(This may not be widely known, because everyone who realises that muggles can be stolen from does so and is jailed.)
It doesn’t matter that much if some wannabe thieves get caught. Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear. An alarm isn’t enough against several wizards who take the time to prepare a raid. Only a round the clock guard would be enough. If Aurors guard all the big Muggle gold vaults (or that the goblins or their dragons do), that might be a sufficient deterrent.
What isn’t clear is why they would install alarms or provide guards, instead of just taking the gold themselves.
Well, if it’s an unusual idea to start with, and hard to hide—I mean, if you don’t get suddenly and suspiciously rich, what’s the point? - and most people get filtered out because their brilliant and original plan was actually anticipated (remember, the whole point of stealing from muggles is that they wont have magical protections) … I can see it being pretty much a non-starter.
Also, is that actually true? I mean, there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in, and so on. Heck, would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often, to the point that the majority of Earth’s gold was lost that way?
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
A thief could still succeed once. That we still use vaults indicates a thief has never succeeded. There’s still something to explain.
Funnily enough, it occurred to me that I have no idea if any such cases have occurred. I still don’t, because all the top Google hits seem to be conspiracy theories or something about how various gold reserves are totally empty. (Maybe a coverup would actually be possible with magic? Hmm … Fort Knox hasn’t been audited in 60 years, supposedly, so who knows?)
But honestly, who cares if you’re the “richest wizard in the world” if you’re in jail and your “wealth” is an unspendable stolen asset (remember, raw gold needs to be converted into coins)?
Yeah, I just meant that muggles wouldn’t actually lose all the gold. It’s a moot point, since clearly this hasn’t happened either way.
A little digging suggests less than a thousand tons. Most of the metal wealth extracted by the Spanish empire was in the form of silver, not gold. The spanish were able to mine about a ton a year from hispanola for some unknown period, and the inca paid a ransom of 24 tons for their king.