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Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

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311–320 of 329 posts

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all fine and dandy, but also IMO it's entirely possible that the US cannot deliver their gold if these countries (and/or others) wanted it back. Just look at what happened when Venezuela wanted their gold back. It took ages and that was a relatively tiny amount. It's extremely naive for many EU countries to still believe that they "have" "their" gold stored in the US. And even more naive to not try and get it…

> The entire US banking and financial system relies on NOT delivering or owning the underlying (fractional reserve banking, federal reserve printing money out of thin air This is sadly a very common misunderstanding of how money is created inside the financial system, even by professional economists and financial advisers. In reality money is not valued at parity with some physical material but as a simple act of acc…

You addressed only 1 of my example points and your post doesn't explain how USD is not essentially "printed" (digitally) out of thin air (or I'm too dumb to read which is entirely possible).

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#312
post #300
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diplomacy is always a murky world but in this case there is one and clear stand out example where what you said is true. It was announced that Minsk 2 was purely meant as a stalling tactic to allow re-armament. Unfortunately for your little theory it was Ukraine and Angela Merkel who admitted this and not Russia. This was made even more painfully obvious just before that day in Feb 2022 when Russia demanded Ukraine a…

These are just stale deflections. Russian diplomacy is indeed stuck in Clausewitzian times: diplomacy is seen as an extension of military strategy and not as a tool for building durable cooperation. This becomes especially apparent when compared to how former great rivals like France and Germany, the UK and Spain, or Sweden and Denmark now conduct their relations with one another. Sweden and Denmark are some of the b…

>These are just stale deflections.

These are hard facts which skewer your narrative.

>Russian diplomacy is indeed stuck in Clausewitzian times: diplomacy is seen as an extension of military strategy and not as a tool for building durable cooperation.

Except that is what they are doing with BRICs with the entire rest of the world. It's only the American-led western hegemonic bloc they're clashing with - exclusively puppets and military junior partners of the United States like France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

Outside of this hegemonic military/economic bloc nobody has sanctioned Russia, which is why the effect of the sanctions we levied ended up being so pathetic. At the same time there is a huge appetite for joining the BRICs because the rest of the world is that fucking sick of us.

>When you put Russia against this

"This" is an empire in decline. The west is already following the same path as the USSR in the 1980s (dutch disease, massive industrial decline, fast incoming military overspend), except tailed off with more tacit and explicit support for genocide as a cherry on top. We're the best.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you ok? Fort Knox has nothing to do with the federal reserve.

It has everything to do with the topic this thread is about though.

It really doesn’t. The Federal Reserve’s gold vault is in New York, not Fort Knox, and it’s separate from the U.S. Treasury’s holdings. This thread started about foreign gold held at the Fed, Germany and Italy’s reserves, not U.S. sovereign gold in Kentucky. Mixing those up is like arguing about your neighbor’s bank account while waving around your mattress stash. Different institutions, different controls, different issues.

Or while you are at it provide some evidence to your conspiracy theory.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire US banking and financial system relies on NOT delivering or owning the underlying (fractional reserve banking, federal reserve printing money out of thin air This is sadly a very common misunderstanding of how money is created inside the financial system, even by professional economists and financial advisers. In reality money is not valued at parity with some physical material but as a simple act of acc…

You addressed only 1 of my example points and your post doesn't explain how USD is not essentially "printed" (digitally) out of thin air (or I'm too dumb to read which is entirely possible).

You actually had examples? I read your post and saw nothing but unsubstantiated conspiracy.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#315
post #130
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold doesn't derive its value from those applications. It is valuable for the same reason as Bitcoin is: I can't create it out of thin air to screw you over when I settle a transaction.

Settling a transaction might be in this case the ship with the gold sinking in the ocean. This is one of the primary reasons Bitcoin exists. As long as I can remember the seed phrase it’s always with me. And main reason why I would rather have bitcoin than gold. Transporting all that gold will be a tad more difficult though. I wish they luck though.

Banks commonly deposit gold at other banks or branches in other countries precisely to avoid the sinking ship problem. Paying with gold turns into an accounting transaction or into a visit to the vault.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, from the Ukrainian perspective. But this topic is about Germany.

Germany is a member of the EU and NATO, the eastern nations of which are openly, publicly, and officially threatened with Russian invasion to the point they are now preparing for conflict.

e.g. https://www.nzz.ch/english/how-german-pilots-counter-russian...

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can nowadays look at a 3D-plot of internal density in an X-Ray computed tomography. On the chance that somebody mixed up an alloy that has the exact same density and X-Ray density as gold, you can try X-Ray absorption spectra which depend on nuclear resonances of different nuclei, so would conclusively prove presence and amount of non-Gold material. And you can do activation analysis, where you activate the ingot…

This all sounds kind of expensive to do for every bar?

Usually you draw a representative random sample for these kinds of things. You only test every bar if you detect a problem in the random sample.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#318
post #308
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NATO is bigger and it has more soldiers and bigger armies, why do you think Russia will invade NATO, it's just ridiculous. :( It is not Russia that is increasing in territories, it is NATO that is approaching Russia over the past few decades.

Just to be clear: Russia has invaded Ukraine, has declared that the country has no right to exist and ukraine people will be exterminated, but it is NATO that is the aggressor? This is textbook russian propaganda.

No one unarmed was exterminated and no one say that will be exterminated. You're exaggerating. None of the unarmed people were harmed on purpose. Yes, there are crimes in war. And there are precedents when the perpetrators were arrested. Yes, some words about "existing" really don't sound nice and strange, but if you really want to figure all out, then you need to watch the original full speeches, rather than quotes selected by interested Western media. But Ukraine and West reaction is not adequate. Ukraine nationalis really comitted bloody crimes, even european court confirmed it(https://www.echr.coe.int/w/judgment-concerning-ukraine-2). Ukraine and the West could really fight for their territories without war by peaceful ways. Ukraine also had no plans to hold a referendum on joining NATO, although not all people who support the West and the European Union would support joining the NATO military alliance. No Russia will be able to hold the territories if the entire civilian population went on strike against it. Sorry if you're not interested in looking into this deeply and you can't be persuaded.

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for an alloy tungsten will do.

It is rather expensive to make objects of pure tungsten. The tungsten objects that you see for sale are not pure and they have a density more than 5% lower than gold, which is easy to detect by weighing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tungsten-filled-gold-bars-fo...

Re: Germany and Italy pressed to bring $245B of gold home from US

#320
post #312
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are just stale deflections. Russian diplomacy is indeed stuck in Clausewitzian times: diplomacy is seen as an extension of military strategy and not as a tool for building durable cooperation. This becomes especially apparent when compared to how former great rivals like France and Germany, the UK and Spain, or Sweden and Denmark now conduct their relations with one another. Sweden and Denmark are some of the b…

>These are just stale deflections. These are hard facts which skewer your narrative. >Russian diplomacy is indeed stuck in Clausewitzian times: diplomacy is seen as an extension of military strategy and not as a tool for building durable cooperation. Except that is what they are doing with BRICs with the entire rest of the world. It's only the American-led western hegemonic bloc they're clashing with - exclusively pu…

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