Top 10 Gold-Richest Countries of the World

I hope few people still remember the famous Gregory Peck movie 'Mackenna's Gold' - a movie where many people like Gregory Peck (acting as Marshal MacKenna), Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Camilla Sparv, and Julie Newmar wandered into the wilderness of the Apache land in search of gold, with an old Turkey buzzard flying over them and haunting them for not stealing the Apache gold.

Mackenna's Gold - the Fiction

Most of these perished except of course Mr Mackenna and Camilla Sparv (Inga Bergmann in he movies), who escape the wrath of the Apache land but get away with gold in the saddlebag, which was loaded by Sgt.Tibbs (Telly Savalas).

But that was fiction, artfully created with the famous song 'Old Turkey Buzzard' and its awesome music being played in the background. 

This post is about the real gold that many countries have amassed and use it to affect economies and money game around the world. Its price manipulation makes economies rise and fall by those who have it in abundance. Recently its price has soared to $1,918.10 per ounce and those who had bough huge quantities speculating its rise, made fortunes when gold touched its highest. However, thanks to Greece debt swap that has brought it down to now somewhere around  $1,670.

Countries with real gold

Mashable has carried out a survey to find out which 10 countries have the Apache's gold securely hidden in their vaults and play with the world economy with it. The study shows that purchases by central banks surged to 439.7 tonnes in 2011, from 77 tonnes the previous year, according to the World Gold Council (WGC). Mexico, Russia and South Korea were some of the largest buyers of gold. At 90.5 percent, Portugal is the country with the highest percent of its foreign reserves in gold.

Here are those Top 10 Gold-Richest countries of the world as found out by Mashable:

France
Japan
Netherlands
India
Germany
Russia
Switzerland
China
USA
Italy

I have jumbled up the chronology as given in the reference source, so before you actually read the complete post for which the link is given down below, make a guess who tops the list and which country is at the bottom. This would be an interesting listing and guesswork.

Read more at Mashable about the amount of gold amassed by each one of the above countries which official gold holding ranging between 557.7 tonnes to 8,133.5 tonnes.