Irregular Webcomic! #5076

When being liquid is not the same thing as being a liquid.

I tried finding any real world liquid assets.

Crude oil costs a bit over US$80 a barrel at the moment, which is 159 litres. So pretty close to US$0.50 a litre.

Mercury... well... I had serious trouble finding the market price of mercury. Firstly, apparently there's a company named "Liquid Mercury", and 90% of the hits I got trying to find the price of mercury ended up giving me that company's share price. Then I found this page on a site dedicated to metal prices, which looks very useful for historical mercury prices, until you realise it quotes the price "per flask" of mercury, and nowhere does it give any indication how much mercury is in a "flask". Wikipedia tells me a "flask" is an ancient unit of measure, used for mercury and nothing else, corresponding to 76 pounds, or a little over 2.5 litres at room temperature. But it looks like the price of mercury has gone up and down unpredictably by large amounts in recent years and that metals page only lists prices up to 2018, so who knows what price it would be today?

Google searching for "How much does a flask of mercury cost" gives a whole slew of pages that seem consistent at about $135-$150... until you look closely and realise these are all homework problems for school mathematics lessons on calculating volumes. And not actual prices in any sense.

Remember when you used to be able to look stuff up on the Internet??

I found another source that gives mercury prices in Australia, recent indications being about US$30,000 per ton. Now, again it doesn't say what sort of ton, but let's assume a metric ton, which converts to about 74 litres of mercury. This gives a price of US$400 a litre. But again, the price fluctuates wildly, depending on which countries are importing/exporting the substance.

Anyway, after half an hour I gave up. My best guess is that mercury, while a liquid asset in the scientific sense, is a volatile one in the economic sense.