Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

norberthaering.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 238 posts

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#161

Post by sdenton4 »

easilyBored wrote: post #158
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold sort of works for sovereigns. It's crap for individuals. Any situation where you need to rely on physical gold is a situation where someone else will take it from you by force.

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians. Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double. If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying…

Eventually, hyperinflation causes money to be measured in a logarithmic scale... And it's fun to imagine the value if a dollar falling below the plank length.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#162

Post by hueving »

easilyBored wrote: post #158
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold sort of works for sovereigns. It's crap for individuals. Any situation where you need to rely on physical gold is a situation where someone else will take it from you by force.

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians. Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double. If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying…

Gold coins so people can steal them from you in this doomsday scenario? Gold is about as useful as monopoly money when facing a gang of people that will just kill you and take whatever they can.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#163

Post by avar »

iamben wrote: post #115
owenversteeg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As fascinating as that is, what I find to be even more interesting is that the total wealth in that insane concrete-bubble structure built to withstand atomic attack... is just over a billion USD. That's nothing in the scale of global wealth. And that's the largest gold vault on Earth. Pretty disappointing if you ask me. The entire gold vault (one million ounces of gold) is worth about a third of one percent of JPMor…

The largest _private_ gold vault. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is meant to be the largest (there may be more in Swiss banks) holding about 7000 metric tons (apparently).

Which is around $280 billion, or about 1.5% of us GDP.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#164

Post by ChuckMcM »

erikb wrote: post #36

> Gold is money, which is based on physical ownership, not on trust in the willingness and ability of another party to honor their promises. If you have gold, but you do not have it under your control, it is almost pointless to have gold. Really digging this one. That's why I proactively not listen to investors/consultants who suggest to buy some gold derivates for savety purposes. In other regards: What's the point…

My read on it was that the Author is saying that maybe there is more truth to the conspiracy theories that America has looted everyone's gold out of the Fed for its own purposes than you might think.

His reasoning appears to be, "If the world is, as the Fed presents it, then we should be able get our gold back. But we can't." and then notes agencies that the auditing agency that was aggressively pushing even an accounting of the available gold has gone silent implying they have been made complicit somehow in the conspiracy.

Here on the outside we can't really know what is going on of course. And frankly if it got out that 1200 tons of gold was on the move I could imagine that would be a tasty target even for nation-state level thieves. But I also found it interesting when the Economist and others reported that the Fed was refusing to let auditors verify their gold deposits. That is a question that really needs an answer and we haven't gotten it yet.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#165

Post by [deleted] »

easilyBored wrote: post #158
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold sort of works for sovereigns. It's crap for individuals. Any situation where you need to rely on physical gold is a situation where someone else will take it from you by force.

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians. Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double. If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying…

[deleted]

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#166

Post by joosters »

For anyone interested in reading more about the standards of gold storage and exchange, the company BuillionVault has some good information on their help/FAQ pages, such as explaining what 'good delivery' bars of gold mean, and how professional gold vaulting works. (Naturally, the pages also promote their own services, but you can ignore all of that)

e.g. https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-guide/ready-to-buy-gold

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#167

Post by hueving »

dualogy wrote: post #84
owenversteeg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As fascinating as that is, what I find to be even more interesting is that the total wealth in that insane concrete-bubble structure built to withstand atomic attack... is just over a billion USD. That's nothing in the scale of global wealth. And that's the largest gold vault on Earth. Pretty disappointing if you ask me. The entire gold vault (one million ounces of gold) is worth about a third of one percent of JPMor…

Well, that's a telling finding. It's just "telling" different conclusions about "global wealth", "JPMorgan's market capitalization", and gold's "fair" value to different minds ;) The only thing that's safe to assess about that bullion is that for all human intents and purposes, it'll outlast infinite numbers of generations, and the other stuff --- won't. That alone tells of the impossibility and futility of putting a…

The same thing could be said about a chunk of any element. "It's worth whatever you imagine because it will last a long time."

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#168

Post by joosters »

roenxi wrote: post #23
rwmj wrote: post #10

Why do countries bother to hold gold? Wouldn't it be sensible to sell as much of it off as possible? (I'm asking like "ELI5" because I'm sure there is a reason)

Currencies actually fail quite regularly (hints: Zimbabwe, Venezuela) - it makes a lot of sense to hold wealth in a form that will survive that. Maybe someone wants to claim that any individual country "will never" suffer from a currency crisis. I'll just point out that America went from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in one election then agree to disagree. Countries want an asset that can hold wealth through a crisis…

But where currencies fail (as in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iraq, etc), gold never became a backup currency. No-one was trading gold coins for goods and services, and anyone trying to leave these countries carrying gold was at serious risk. Gold isn't going to help you here, at worst it'll put you in more danger.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#169

Post by pyvpx »

gumby wrote: post #139
oxryly1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but what is up with comments on zerohedge.com? Not this article necessarily, but so many of the articles on that site it seems the comments are just ridiculous alt-right bot armies arguing back and forth, peppered with links to obviously newly-invented sites touting crackpot theories.

Despite (or because of?) the fact that quite a surprisingly high number of my friends read zero hedge, I've always referred to it as a "gold standard flat-earther conspiracy site." I will say that, like a stopped clock, it generates something meaningful once in a while. But so does a Markov model.

it was slightly more useful in 2010 and before.

Re: Why Deutsche Bundesbank had to promise to leave 1200 tons of gold in New York

#170

Post by easilyBored »

hueving wrote: post #162
easilyBored wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians. Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double. If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying…

Gold coins so people can steal them from you in this doomsday scenario? Gold is about as useful as monopoly money when facing a gang of people that will just kill you and take whatever they can.

Still, better to have them than not. Of course you're not going to walk around with 3 kilo gold chains around or tell people how much gold you got.
Post reply on HN