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Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

abc.net.au

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Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#141

Post by andrewflnr »

lxgr wrote: post #107
tristanj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reading way to much into this. Physical gold bars are transferred via plane between London and New York every day. The gold flies in the cargo holds of regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights. The quantity transferred depends on demand, and could be several metric tons daily. This is nothing unusual. Dubai is another major gold transfer hub, and it operates via the same mechanism. Regarding the articl…

Is gold really sufficiently fungible to enable daily bidirectional sizable flows across the Atlantic, but not fungible enough to allow somebody to net these flows out and save at least one way of the airfare?

Coordination cost maybe. If you're transferring A -> B and C <- D, but A and C or B and D don't know each other or even dislike each other, it's going to be hard to even get them to talk about the fungibility of the actual bars. And I bet airfare is the cheapest part after all the security and paychecks of people arranging the transaction.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#142

Post by paradoxyl »

wazoox wrote: post #9
ivolimmen wrote: post #2

I am dutch and read the news this week but I found it weird that a part of it went to England. I was expecting a European country.

England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe". (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).

The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name and yet calling itself American is almost comical in its ineptitude.

Nobody shakes their metaphorical fist at the Central African Republic for daring to use Central African as its demonym. It's simply understood that the surrounding countries are also African, yet simply do not have the name of the continent in its name.

But if you do want to be pedantic, England is not technically a country anymore, it's the United Kingdom.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#143

Post by jbverschoor »

beloch wrote: post #136
jeroenhd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dutch transfer out of Canada is minimal and pretty much a token amount. Most gold has been transfered out of the USA. As for why, the American people elected Donald Trump for a second time and the recent trade wars have helped spread the notion that maybe the USA cannot be trusted by its supposed allies as much as it once could be.

It's a bizarre headline. New York: 31.33% -> 18.52% Ottawa: 19.72% -> 18.52% My guess is the original title focused just on the U.S., but the editors didn't want to draw attention from the big cheeto, so the headline was changed and now it looks less like the U.S. is the primary target. Honestly, if quick access to their holdings is a concern, I wouldn't hold it against the Dutch if they moved more gold out of Canada…

I mean.. the US has a history concerning gold and duping other countries

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#144

Post by anon84873628 »

voakbasda wrote: post #125
plasma_beam wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

East coast: Oh hey that’s not fair, we have equal amounts of beaches, the water is just a different color. You are going down with us..

Middle America: good luck eating when we cut off both of your food supplies. Now both of you go stand in a corner until you are ready to work together to take down the government that has us all acting this way.

California alone grows about half of the US's nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Both the West Coast and rest of the country could reconfigure production to serve themselves if desired.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#145

Post by epistasis »

anon84873628 wrote: post #139
epistasis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from. The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills. T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by chan…

That said, it's not necessarily a great deal for the US middle class anymore, due to the Triffin Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma This 2020 piece by Lyn Alden is a great explainer: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/ (Not that I think anything Trump has done has helped the situation even accidentally.)

Nothing there explains why it's a bad deal for the middle class.

The middle class actually benefits the most from this situation! More goods, more government services, etc. How much more? Just add up all the trade deficits, that's all benefit accrued almost entirely to the middle class.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#146

Post by anon84873628 »

hedora wrote: post #103
b112 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA & Canada I know the above was in the article, but please never mention the US and Canada in the same breath. Please. That & symbol just irritates. From a Canadian's perspective, it's like mentioning a sophisticated, decent human being, and a slimy smarmy used car salesman, in the same breath. Please.

West coast calling: What if you annexed us? We have beaches and it’d more than double your economy.

Sadly I can't imagine the US letting go of all the Pacific ports and home to Pacific fleet. At best you might draw a line above LA county.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#147

Post by disdegeneration »

anon84873628 wrote: post #140
georgeecollins wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not defending the US government but the reason why you hold treasuries is because if you want to buy something in two years, or ten years, etc. there is a good chance you will want to buy something with dollars. Oil, soy beans, New York real estate..

Until you can buy oil without dollars. This was an explicit agreement called the Petrodollar system, which was premised on the US navy securing international trade. If the US navy proves unable to do that (and exhausts its arms and demonstrates unpreparedness for future conflicts) then the whole premise falls apart. You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to colla…

Until you find a more thrustworthy stewart of the international order. Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse. The russians tried for years to write some replacement fiction into reality (BRICS) even though they would be the first to get shanked if the old great game returned. Its a absurd situation where empire cosplayers long for the times of "greatness" while struggling on even small "to real" acts ..

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#148

Post by logicchains »

epistasis wrote: post #131
prymitive wrote: post #127

The funny thing is that with $40T of public dept US is basically taking money from other countries (in exchange for a pice of paper saying IOU) and then using that money to force these countries to do what’s in US best interests (real or perceived). And the bigger that pile of debt is the more every government is invested in us not going bankrupt, hence the leverage just gets stronger. US is basically a private equit…

What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from. The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills. T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by chan…

>deflation is the only thing worse than inflation.

In any empirical sense this is absolutely false. The only instance of a significant negative instance of deflation was its contribution to the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, and the effect of that was minor compared to the effects of extreme inflation (hyperinflation) that occurred in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. Deflation is inherently self-limiting because people have a baseline of goods they must consume for survival (housing, food etc.), and once that baseline is reached spending does not fall further; there's not a single instance in history of 99% deflation, while 99%, 999% and even 999999999% inflation has happened within even just the past few decades.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#149

Post by anon84873628 »

epistasis wrote: post #145
anon84873628 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, it's not necessarily a great deal for the US middle class anymore, due to the Triffin Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma This 2020 piece by Lyn Alden is a great explainer: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/ (Not that I think anything Trump has done has helped the situation even accidentally.)

Nothing there explains why it's a bad deal for the middle class. The middle class actually benefits the most from this situation! More goods, more government services, etc. How much more? Just add up all the trade deficits, that's all benefit accrued almost entirely to the middle class.

It is explained in the Alden piece, section "The Fraying of the Petrodollar System", subsection "The Triffin Dilemma Unfolds".

What I meant was "blue collar working class" as opposed to the neo-artistocrat professional class. The Triffin Dilemma is a contributor to the K shaped economy and rise of populism.

>And from there, the value of the system depends on who you ask. Folks who are often on the higher end of the income spectrum who worked in finance, government, healthcare, or technology benefitted from this system, since they obtained many of the benefits of globalization and none of the drawbacks. Folks who are often on the lower end of the income spectrum, specifically those that make physical things, are the ones that benefitted least and gave the most up, since their jobs were outsourced and automated at a faster rate than other developed countries. But now with China also undermining the structure of the system, even the geopolitical/hegemonic benefits for the political class are subverted as well.

Re: Netherlands pulls gold out of the US

#150

Post by marcosdumay »

lxgr wrote: post #107
tristanj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reading way to much into this. Physical gold bars are transferred via plane between London and New York every day. The gold flies in the cargo holds of regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights. The quantity transferred depends on demand, and could be several metric tons daily. This is nothing unusual. Dubai is another major gold transfer hub, and it operates via the same mechanism. Regarding the articl…

Is gold really sufficiently fungible to enable daily bidirectional sizable flows across the Atlantic, but not fungible enough to allow somebody to net these flows out and save at least one way of the airfare?

Yes. Gold is fungible only within the same custodian.

Many people buy (normally small) gold bars only to discover that they can't sell them back by the same price.

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