Is the Gold Really Still in Ft Knox???
Germany’s central bank will relocate 54,000 solid gold bars, worth about $36 billion, from deep underneath the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Banque de France in Paris to the safe confines of German soil — vaults at the Bundesbank’s Frankfurt headquarters.
Gold at the New York Fed. (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
The Bundesbank understandably offered few details as to the timing of or methods to be used in the move, which presumably will occur with secret, well-guarded trucks (from Paris) and in numerous small batches by plane from New York. Presumably, it will make sure the villain from "Die Hard: With a Vengeance" is accounted for before the move, along with the "Ocean's 11" gang. And whatever happened to Auric Goldfinger?
But while the notion of billions of dollars in gold bars being transported across the Atlantic and the Franco-German countryside triggered a thousand heist jokes on Twitter, the decision reflects a real, and somewhat disturbing, current in German politics.
The backstory: Germany built up its gold reserves as the flip side of running trade surpluses in the decades after World War II. In practice, much of the world’s gold is stored in vaults underneath central banks: eighty feet below street level and hard against the bedrock of lower Manhattan at the New York Fed, in the ancient vaults of the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street in the City of London, and so on. This is highly convenient; when one government or central bank sells its gold to another, the precious metal can be rolled from one cage to the next, with none of the risk that comes with transporting it across oceans. (For more about the New York Fed's gold storage operation, click here).
The system, of course, is built upon trust – more>>>>>