https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyn8q8gqxo

Germany moved 111t from New York in 2016, and, afaict, nothing since then. There's still 1236t left.

Italy also keeps over 1000t in New York (no plans for repatriation).

This is effectively outsourcing that process to the banks.

If the Banque de France holds physical in New York and sells it to JPMorgan (nothing moves) and then in Paris buys contract for physical from UBS, there will probably need to be physical gold that moves.

In all likelihood, Swiss gold held by e.g. a Gulf customer might be sold to Paris (nothing moves) and JPMorgan may entice Venezuela to take those contracts on its balance sheet (nothing moves). But if it’s a big trade, the price of delivering physical in Paris (or Genève) will go above spot in New York at which point it’s profitable for JPMorgan to take delivery, load up planes and physically ship gold.

It’s typically flown [1].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fish

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_(cracker)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

That'd obviously give the US an immense amount of power, so in exchange the US would agree to make the USD convertible to gold at a fixed rate by other countries (as opposed to e.g. individuals). So the whole point here is that if the US tried to print a whole bunch of money to exploit our 'exorbitant privilege', countries would be able to take their now devaluing USD and exchange into a gold at a stable rate and make a whole bunch of money. So it was intended to be a self correcting system.

The problem is that the US did print a whole bunch of money anyhow, and when France and other countries said 'hey we'd like to convert our USD to gold' we just said 'nah' and defaulted on our obligations, bringing Bretton Woods to an end in 1971. That signaled the beginning of the modern completely fiat economic system, and led to some wild quotes from the time. For instance the Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon (who was president in 71) has a great quote of, 'The dollar is our currency, but your problem.'

---

It's critical to understand this history to understand what's happening today with countries increasingly seeking to replace the dollar. Many want something akin to Bretton Woods 2.0, but without any country being given a win button. And that's not so easy to devise!

There was a big thing that happened between the Great Depression and Bretton Woods that's pretty critical to why that system emerged.

That seems like wild thing to agree to. Where can I read more about this?

The hard part is getting countries to agree on one system. Coming up with a good one is easy. You can either do EU style governance where countries vote on policy or go hands off and anchor everything to crypto.

To put it bluntly, America ended WWII with a global nuclear monopoly and then only industrial base on the planet that hadn't been bombed into smithereens. That put it in a unique position to set the terms of the peace. The only party that came out with any comparable leverage was the USSR on account of its massive army and willingness to maintain a wartime economy that would have been untenable in the democracies of the West. (Absent the USSR, it's again unlikely Bretton-Woods would have emerged–the Soviet threat created an incentive to coöperate.)

More than that, the end of WWII saw American complete its then priority of decolonization. That meant there were lots of newly created countries, not quite peacefully but not at the level of violence that usually accompanies new-country formation (with obvious exceptions, e.g. Partition and Israel/Palestine), that could be wooed with riches and ideology.

I think most people would suggest the converse..... that gold prices have doubled over the last three years compared to virtually any stable western currency.

At the risk of certain downvote barrage, this is a solved problem, at least at international settlement scale: use cryptocurrency.

If you actually loaded gold into shipping containers and obeyed the weight restrictions, all the gold in the world would take up less than 8400 TEU, which would be considered a mid size cargo ship.

However, if you made half the copper disappear, you'd have a big problem.

[0] https://www.usagold.com/gold-arbitrage-trade-winds-down-amid...

> load up planes and physically ship gold.

they would not load planes, they’d load ships, because it’s much cheaper.

“In focussing almost exclusively on gold bars, jewellery, and high-grade recycled gold (over 40% purity), all of which generally travel by air, analysts have tended to disregard the maritime space as a significant arena for illicit gold flows (LBMA, 2022[9]).”

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/illicit-flows-of-gold-c...

The Hong Kong gold vault stores at the airport, not the harbour:

“ Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”

https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-67/gold-vault-at-the...

This makes it sound like emergency delivery of gold is important. “Quick, we need to get 20 tons of gold to Nepal, stat! Go go go go go!”

I can tell you from first hand experience that moving high value items isn't as exciting as you'd think.

ULDs are the standardized shipping containers of the sky. You can rent ones that have an inner armored layer and tamper evident seals. They fly as commercial cargo, usually on the flag carrier airline if its a government load. No special rituals or armed guards. Shipments are broken up so the loss of a single aircraft is at most $5 or $10 million.

There are some highly specialized aircraft that transport full loads but they tend to be closer to the supply side, moving bulk gold or diamonds from remote mines for processing.

Cash is the interesting exception (most non-US currency is produced by commercial printers) where a country will send its military to go pick up one big shipment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

Did the banks export gold then?

The article says the issue is foreign entities buying American gold as a hedge against a volatile, risky dollar as a reserve currency.

Buying in Europe creates a demand in Europe, and selling in US creates extra supply in US. So, the market takes care of the transfer from high supply to low supply area.

The Netherlands physically moved 27 tons of gold from the US and Canada (mostly New York) to the Netherlands this year.

How many other bank or multiples around the world would be able to support such a sale ?

Intercontinental Exchange launches trading in gold futures in London - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/e5d7ca...

Just to give a small hint: the 1998 "strage del Cermis" [0], in which a US aircraft mistakenly cut a cable supporting a cable car and resulted in the killing of 20 people. The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, and his navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were put on trial in the United States and were found not guilty.

Try to imagine something different. An Italian military aircraft flies in the US, and mistakenly kills 20 people. What would have happened to the Italian pilot?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash

The official story is that the maps they were given were out-dated and led to confusion in their location.

It was painfully obvious that the incident was inspired more by Top Gun than those notoriously bad maps the USAF uses....

But as you say, the USA investigated itself and assured its little buddy Italy that there was nothing improper. So sorry about those dead folks.

Although a sibling commenter mentioned that they moved their gold by selling it and rebuying it in Europe. If that gold qualifies as non-reserve gold after sale, and is moved out after sale to (for example) China, then perhaps?

[0]: See the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134172

I don't know. Does it count as export if it's not moved an inch?

Not sure if "The U.S governments gold reserves" also includes the ones from other countries though.

You gotta remember, if those miners weren't basically jumped up amateurs they wouldn't be on a tv show.

I remember watching the first couple seasons of that show. Every time it went to commercial break they'd try to hype up the melodrama with "we gotta do X or we're not gonna reach a thousand ounces!"

My wife and I still quote that to each other out of the blue.

If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.

Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.

Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"

Admittedly I live in a state roughly 3x the area of Texas.

Crazy idea go look at a map.

Theres one mine outside a town, that has more gold than all of America.

Half the worlds lithum for example also comes from WA. Most of the worlds treasures that are dug out of the ground can also be found there. Most of it has never seen a person, theres far more there to be found one day in the future.

Consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the far east.

If a European buys a product "made by" Apple or nvidia or Nike or Levis - that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, or wherever. America still gets the profits, though.

Airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as the engine production capacity of GE and P&W are booked for years to come. Also, unlike Airbus which has multiple final assembly plants across the world, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.

As for aircraft, not that many in number, but very expensive things with very expensive parts.

A lot of components are actually imports from other countries, eg Japan manufactures wings.

We don't export nor import "net" anything. The definition of exports is not affected by imports.

So many trillion-dollar valued AI-focused companies.

How are service exports counted? All together? Or not considered exports?

Literally the link in the first paragraph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IEAXGG.

It’s conventional, in American English, for exports unadorned to mean just goods. It’s anachronistic. But it isn’t wrong.

I think the real reason is that they're afraid of political instability in the US that may result in 1) an inability to retrieve their gold, or 2) the government confiscating it.

A lot of this stuff is just business as usual, and then tabloids like to turn it into some doom and gloom nonsense.

Germany 47.2 USA 96.7 France 108.8 Italy 127.7

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

Germany 47.2; 1.3

UK 93.8; 1.3

USA 96.7; 2.3

France 108.8; 0.4

Italy 127.7; 0.8

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

Either. You can check major sources (WSJ, Financial Times, &c.)

> because the official ones are very questionable?

I trust the institution regardless of what party is in power.

Broadly speaking: low growth, high debt, aging populations, aging infrastructure, and very intense economic pressure from countries like the US and China, but also increasing competition with the rising of other countries for global resources.

I think the idea is to rise the value of your currency, you rise the demand for your currency, by selling for it something that everybody wants, like gold.

Of course this demand is artificial and you'll run out of hold to sell at some point, but it can hopefully carry you over thd bump.

Sincere question.

Massivly surprised to see a link to this storyline/paradigm here on HN, great!

Cheers! :-))

If you belive in such stories, it may explain why humans are so focused on Gold, and not other precious metals, which are much more rare.

The idea behind the story is just great, isnt it? The idea of whatever space travelling species to come here to mine for gold with human "robots" is really cool. While they could have landed on asteroids which much more Gold-per-ton, they chosed earth because the bio machines available here didnt need any "outer planetary" maintenance or refills?

:-D

edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?

Half a million years later we are still at it. Innovation is like, rock music, bitcoin mining, minecraft etc

Pretty deep

Now I understand why humans are cattle, not pets. The overlords designed it right.

Because you sell it cheap.

> Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.

Exactly.

It has value because it won't spoil and you can sell it later gor the same or more because it's scarce.

Nations like to use it for reserves because it’s stable, historically fit for the purpose of exchange, and well-understood. You can “count” it and use this to settle balances in a way that outsiders can’t easily interfere with.

Almost all “value” is strange and complex. Why is Francium, which is less useful than even gold, worth a theoretical $28 billion per ounce? (Not that you would find any buyers for that quantity.) Why is a Black Lotus card worth $3 million? Why is a dollar worth whatever you can buy for a dollar?

The short but final answer: because other people want it.

And, gold is limited (in recoverable quantities) in Earth's crust. Nobody can print a bunch more of it, unlike fiat currency.

Between those two, it's what many people reach for when they fear that the government is going to devalue their currency. They can buy now, with currency that will soon be worth less, and what they buy will be worth something even after the currency becomes worth less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102?wprov=sfl...

>That’s not just because the price of gold reached record high prices. In February 2026, the tons of gold exported may have set an all-time record.

    > Normally, America’s highest value exports are either oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft and their parts.  Not now.  Starting in October 2025, the value of gold exports has topped all other categories almost every month.

Relative to quantity, the price of gold might have less to do with why it’s the top of the list, but gold being more valuable in general might still be the main reason it’s at the top.

For example:

June

Oil at $1 a barrel

Gold at $10 a ton

100 barrels of oil exported - $100

9 tons of gold exported - $90

By value, oil is the top export.

——-

July

Oil at $1 a barrel

Gold at $9 a ton

100 barrels of oil exported - $100

12 tons of gold exported - $108

By value, gold is now the top export.

——-

Even though the price of gold dropped—-the inverse of our current situation to illustrate an extreme—-the general higher price of gold is more relevant to the ranking than its quantity increase.

https://logisticsmaterial.com/trade/americas-biggest-exports...

edit: A better source that uses Census BEA data: https://ustradesignals.com/statistics/exports-by-industry

and says the same thing.

edit2: A third source using different data saying the same thing. https://tradeint.com/insights/us-export-data/#elementor-toc_...

https://imgur.com/a/bAbAFru

For instance, TradeInt advertises it is trusted by Samsung, but I can't find any record of Samsung utilizing TradeInt for anything. TradeInt advertises a 5-star rating on platforms like Product Hunt (YC S14), yet the person who created the listing created their account when TradeInt launched and has no followers or other activity since 2024.

They all appear to be blog spam, from my perspective.

Anyone (or any AI) can publish anything to confirm any viewpoint. What makes those links worth sharing?

For example, Brazilians love to say that the Portuguese stole their gold. Even the highest estimates I could find amount to like 1000 tons of gold which works out to around 135 billion dollars today. Meanwhile, the government robs them of several times that amount every single year: tax revenue is currently around 815 billion dollars.

Silence - The Deconstruction of Faith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj7SGe7FcYE

Sounds like a refining bottleneck.

Globally, “refining capacity is operating at near-total utilization” [1]. That is particularly true in America, where refiners are “limiting purchases” [2] and “turning away new clients” [3].

Global demand for gold—lead by China—is surging. That, in turn, made gold “the most-developed commodity over 2020-25” with “the highest [new] mine count each year during the period” [4].

Where are those mines opening? In “Australia, Canada and the US,” which “accounted for the largest share of new gold production.”

[1] https://www.skillings.net/gold-refining-report-global-standa...

[2] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/metal-refiners-t...

[3] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/refining-pipelin...

[4] https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...

Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.

I’m guessing those new mines opening are to limit the impact of this sort of situation in the future.

> Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.

It is common for gold mines to shut down when the price of gold is low, or when technologies used cannot extract a profitable amount. Mines can quickly resume operations when either conditions are met.

Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine? You’re not going to touch either of them!

Just get a note saying you own the gold in whatever cubic foot below ground marked by some coordinate system.

OG PoW.

Less facetiously: refined gold is a commodity. Gold ores are various and require expertise to differentiate and value. They're also bulky relative to their gold content.

This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.

The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.

Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.

It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.

Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.

The other reason is the Christian historically yes-and-no relationship with usury (banking).

Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?

The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

"...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

The above reaction is at the end of the section.

> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt. The value of a neutron in a nuclear reactor is the opportunity cost of it not hitting a uranium atom to produce fission. 1 mole of neutrons can produce about $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity assuming 40% efficiency. 1 mole of neutrons could alternatively produce 1 mole of gold, which is worth about $26,500. So it's roughly 4 times the market price of gold.

Of course there would be the cost of building and running the reactor and the associated chemical processes to collect the gold, but these cost are probably similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries. Certainly not 12 orders of magnitude more.

While it's not economical to make gold this way, it is economical to make certain medical isotopes this way.

> Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt.

It is worth checking before accusing someone of making something up...

This appears to come from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l..., which states that the author of a 1980 experiment says "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment." That appears (from skimming sources) to come from a running cost of $5000/hr to produce a few hundred atoms of gold per hour. Modern methods are probably more efficient, but the number didn't come from nowhere.

Addendum: And per https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc, the LHC can turn lead into gold at a rate of 89000 nuclei per second, which is ridiculously far from economically reasonable. The LHC cost $9 billion and uses a lot of power, so I'd say not "similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries" used for gold.

"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."

The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.

> I'm in a mood to be especially caustic for one who is flatly wrong...

Comments like this are never acceptable here, no matter how right you are or feel you are. This site is for people who have basic standards of decency, at the very least. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My outburst should have been concealed in more diplomatic language, I'll grant.

I am frightened of what I'm doing next (driving to Mazatlan).

Begging your pardon.

"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.

...

In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."

When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.

Holy fucking badass move.

...

"When you put these factors together, my suspicion is that a high percentage of U.S. gold exports are going to China, though some must first detour through Swiss refineries to convert the gold into kilogram bars of acceptable purity. It is possible that the U.S. government may have acquiesced in this form of payment in return for other political concessions having to do with a number of global uncertainties."

-----------------

U.S. bond yields (the interest the U.S. pays on its debt) are increasing because there is less demand for U.S. treasury bonds. Lenders are reluctant to buy U.S. government debt, but the U.S. government needs that money, so it must pay more. This reduces the value of the USD (i.e. increases inflation) and makes the USD a less attractive reserve currency (A good reserve currency holds its value.)*. Gold is just one alternative option, but it is something the U.S. actually has a fair amount of. The U.S. would likely be exporting Swiss francs now if it had a lot of those too.

Why is there less demand for U.S. bonds? The U.S. is accruing a lot of debt with high spending and reduced taxes at the same time AI companies are competing for investment dollars (i.e. loans). There's only so much capital to go around, so interest rates go up.

TL;DR: U.S. spends too much. Taxes too little. AI companies spend too much. Make too little. Investors want more interest to supply cash, so U.S. bond yields go up and USD value goes down. Anyone looking for stable currencies to hold start switching to gold (or others). No grand Chinese conspiracy is necessary.

____________

* The USD is doing well at the current moment, almost inexplicably, but the important thing is what lenders think it will do in the future.

But yes, higher yields can be related to demand, but they're not simply a function of demand. They relate to things like inflation expectations, and so the short term rates set by the Fed, and the risk premium. In this case likely the higher rates are not high due to demand but rather due to inflation expectations and the Fed having raised the overnight rate.

Bid to cover can be one estimate of demand and I'm not really seeing anything particularly exciting going on here: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/30431/us-10y-bid-to-cover-ra...

That is how we get all those imports cheaper than most countries. Trump just made a deal w Putin for example to import Russia’s diesel … in exchange for USD.

Its a dumb stunt for people who have no idea of the actual numbers.

Following efficiency measures affecting independent oversight in FY2025, the transition is expected to substantially reduce storage costs and security requirements. Under the program, gold bars are exchanged for TrumpBarz™, a cryptocurrency developed through a sovereign–foreign public–private partnership. Its ownership structure is described as "fully transparent," and reportedly associated closely with Mr. Putin, a connection officials dismissed as "purely geographical, financial, and personal.". "This is the biggest heist in history," reported The Downhill, shortly before being informed of violating various national security directives and revocations of its press credentials. The Trump administration declined to comment, while Mr. Musk noted in his interview to us: "Storing digital certificates is much more efficient than storing gold bars. We have reduced the weight of America’s gold reserves by 100% without changing a single number in the spreadsheet."

/s

Tracking gold shipment is the next logical step for law enforcement.

So it's probably a short lived bubble, for anyone weighing investments.

Of course the Americans would sell God. And their mother. Well some Americans would, and the law would be on their side.

Actually they'd sell their god fearing fellow Americans, their goodness, and make a product out of them. They're the gold of the USA, but they're being destroyed by the straw-man-God propaganda industry.

Money is a virus that has no problem destroying the host. People ritually sell what don't belong to them all the time. Like the air we breathe, the native American lands, state power, or land on the moon. "Don't care" equals great profit. How is this ever going to end well?

How did it come to it that America supports the neo-Soviets, we have flying cars, AI is gradually taking over the world, billionaires own most of the world's wealth, and I just thought a heading like this is normal?

I think agent Krasnov needs to have all his assets seized and given to The People. That includes the whole corrupt family dynasty. It is fascinating to see how easily the US democracy can be disabled; Yuri explained this in the 1980s already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw

Most likely the latter.

On the contrary, back in 2023, there used to be huge arbitrage window between comex/LBMA gold and SHFE/SGE gold, basically New York and London gold vs Shanghai gold. So tons of gold were actually imported to China vaults by banks who trying to capture the arb profit. In short moves backed the arb are usually real, and genuine. Moves not backed by the physical arb, are usually more like a political signal or part of the diplomatic play.