For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to put together a chart examining the cost of gas in terms of something harder than the U.S. Dollar…but I’ve never gotten around to tracking down the hard data myself.
So, I was pleased to see that Rick Powell posted the average price in US Dollars of a gallon of gas and an ounce of gold at the start of each year from 1998 through 2008 in a discussion on oil prices on misc.transport.road.
Raw data like that can be used to make an interesting-looking chart:
![[Gallons of Gas per Ounce of Gold]](http://www.triskele.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/image.png)
I should admit that the chart is, arguably, a little “dishonest”, in that one makes some potentially inappropriate assumptions when assembling a chart like this. Specifically, there’s an implicit assumption that an ounce of gold is a stable unit of value, which ignores some of the distorting effects of speculation, investment, and industrial demand on the commodity.
However, I think it does help make the point that the high prices we pay for petrol at the pump are somewhat distorted by other financial trends which also impact us. For example, the real buying power of an American dollar is not what it once was.