Quote Originally Posted by The Evil DM View Post
The amount of gold required to fulfill that 2% cash for total of all wealth is in excess of all gold mined on earth since we discovered how to mine and refine gold.
The problem, though, is that at level 20 most characters have entered the 'Wish Economy', the point at which such things as 'scarcity' become a thing of the past, since anybody and their mother can generate arbitrarily large amounts of whatever material they want.
GP comes from more than just the Prime Material as well. Elemental Earth is infinitely large, filled with caverns, veins of precious metals, and all manner of wonderful shinies. And any wizard worth his salt at that level isn't seriously worried about gold. They can literally just snap their fingers and PAO up a small mountain of gold, or ask one of their Solar buddies to grant them a nice, lovely quarter ton of the stuff.
To us, gold is precious and valuable because there's a finite amount of it. To adventurers, gold is dirt-cheap because the multiverse is literally incapable of running out of it.