Repatriate the gold': German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults | Hacker News Reader

Repatriate the gold': German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults

theguardian.com

95 pointsvinni2195 comments

Good idea, Netherlands should follow suit.

The fed is being dismantled in front of our eyes.

Militia's shoot US citizens for documenting their illegal behavior.

Insane

The Dutch absolutely should NOT follow suit. You guys stole our (Romanian) golden helmet when we sent it to a museum in the Netherlands[1] because you don't have any armed guards at museums.

Maybe send your gold to a country that actually protects priceless things, like the UK.

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-thieves-blew-u...

The UK under Gordon Brown foolishly sold off most of its gold reserves. If they had kept thrm, they would be worth £40B more today, or 10 times what it was sold for.

Good idea, but don’t be surprised when threatened with 100% tariffs. Canada got that threat (again? honestly lost track) just yesterday.

There is already arbitrary tariff. At this point, it is better to trade with other countries instead of chasing the US. Let the American citizen pay their tariff, their loss.

I wouldn’t worry too much about those threats. This administration is so erratic that you may see those same threats made against you for any other reason down the line even if you keep it put.

Italy should do it as well.

Militia? No, the government! ICE is an official government agency.

i mean...

    militia
    noun
    
    1. a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency

"civilians trained as soldiers but not part of the regular army"

I don't know if you're from the US, but here, militia applies solely to civilian groups and not government ones.

> Germany holds the world’s second-largest national gold reserves after the United States, with approximately $194B worth — 1,236 metric tons—currently stored at the Federal Reserve in New York

Moving that much gold makes me think that’s a great opportunity for the world’s biggest heist!

That's going to take a lot of Minis!

You're confusing movies. You'd need dump trucks and a lot of quarters to pay for the toll when robbing the Fed.

This is why, “I trust everyone. It’s the devil inside them I don’t trust.”

Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea...

Not really, a Mini Cooper has a payload capacity of 450kg according to some googling.

That gives us ~2.7 Minis.

If we factor in the weight of the driver, then we can comfortably get away with 4 Minis, each taking 312kg of gold which leaves us with 138kg per Mini for the driver and any gear that might be needed for the heist.

Your calculations are off by some margin. Assuming 312kg per car, it would take 3962 minis to transport it all, somewhat more than the 4 you accounted for. Of course you could do this with 4 cars over a thousand round trips - I'm not sure which option is most likely to lead to success, I suspect both might arouse suspicion.

D'oh! I just realized my mistake. For some reason I equated metric ton with kilogram in my math.

If a plan was made to repatriate it, chances are this will happens slowly over years, possibly decades. A lot of it might not even be "moved", but rather "swapped" for gold physically in the EU by means of various vehicles: such as selling gold at a slight loss in the US, and buying gold in the EU. Doing so might be cheaper than arranging for physical transport of large quantities.

When large quantities of gold are actually transported "at once", it usually happens in secret on warships. Maybe military planes would be used nowadays? Who knows. Good luck anyhow.

They did it previously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation#Germany

The French also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...

(well, not really, as it weren't direct gold reserves but gold-backed dollar reserves)

Back in 2013, a rather different regime held power in the US.

Wouldn't it be a "big loss" if the market believes that gold in Fort Knox is not retrievable? Same as in Argentina, where currency controls led to 1 USD in an Argentinian savings account to be worth less than 1 USD outside the country.

In normal times, yes. But I'm not sure if that still holds if there is a sense of urgency, because no one knows when Trump might get the next stupid idea.

Also I wonder if the rising gold price would interact with this, though I think this would make the "sell and re-buy" strategy actually more viable, at least if you buy first and then sell.

The Remmos and al-Zeins are probably thinking about that already, but as long as the Sparkasse isn't in charge of the transfer I'd say such a heist will be too difficult for the usual suspects.

Maybe this time it would succeed since McClane has dementia.

Why do they think the US will give it to them? After all, last time this happened, the US didn't actually have the gold, it cancelled all gold IOUs — effectively stealing the gold — and that was the Nixon shock. It made the US very wealthy for the next half century.

Aren't you confusing two things? When Nixon suspended Bretton Woods, he wasn't refusing to repatriate gold, he was reneging on the promise that dollars could be converted into gold (one of the reasons being that it no longer had enough physical gold to redeem).

So countries like France held dollars and could no longer get them converted to gold. From my reading, before 1971, all the requests to convert dollars by France, Switzerland, and the UK were all honoured, contributing to the crisis. I don't believe anyone were refused conversion until 1971. And even then, everyone still had their dollars. All they lost was the ability to redeem for gold according to the fixed Bretton Woods price. Dollars could still be used to buy gold at market value.

But this article is talking about repatriating gold owned by other governments but physically held in vaults by the US. A bunch of countries (including Germany) have already repatriated vast amount that were housed by the US, and those requests have never been refused. The Federal Reserve is said to even keeps the bars owned by other countries physically separate, rather than commingled.

That's a refusal to repatriate, since other countries had sent their gold to the US to exchange for dollars with the understanding they could exchange it back at an time.

Is that happened? I'm not an expert on the history of Bretton Woods, but my understanding is countries that sent gold to be stored in the US retained ownership over it, and repatriation was never refused.

If they had converted gold to dollars, this only suspended their ability to "rebalance" between gold and dollars, and no value was lost.

The dollars were worth a small fraction of the gold. It's true that no value was lost — because that value was transferred from the other countries to the US.

That doesn't sound right. Money is fungible. Anyone who missed the "window" to convert in 1971 (which major countries like UK, Germany, and France didn't, as far as I can see) still had their dollars. The US-domiciled gold that backed the dollars had always belong the US; so the dollars being an "IOU" makes sense in a colloquial sense, I guess, but it's a gross simplification that misses the broader point about how Bretton Woods affected monetary policy. It shifted the US into being able to maintain a permanent trade deficit, and the US was free to devalue the dollar (effectively the world's default currency) without repercussion, which is good for the US but not for everyone else.

The dollars were worth much less than the gold. As soon as you couldn't exchange dollars for gold any more, the value of a dollar fell by a factor of several to reflect that.

That would be more or less equivalent to defaulting on government bonds, in the sense that the latter are only backed by the buyers trust that the US will pay them back.

The result would be catastrophic for the US: worst case would be a domino cash in of American debt.

Many Trump supporters actually believe a collapse of the dollar would be a good thing, and that Trump has a plan, because of (some vague bogeyman about the federal reserve). They don’t realize or want to admit that this would mean they would become poorer overnight.

Well there is that "project 2025" that we were told wasn't real.

There's an amusing anecdote about the Dutch queen who asked the prime minister if he read Mein Kampf.

Everyone is just desperately pretending none of this is happening.

It already happened — see Nixon shock — and was enormously beneficial for the US economy.

This is not the same thing at all, you're confusing fixed exchange rate with just giving back something you don't own.

> why do they think the US will give it to them?

Because gold repatriation isn't something that special or unthinkable. It happened multiple times already.

Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and Germany have asked a significant portion of their gold back. The US gave them and the world kept working as before. The amount of doom posting in this thread is mildly amusing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation#Germany

> Why do they think the US will give it to them?

Perhaps they think asking is the best way to find out.

The biggest customer of Canadian Mint gold bullion are US investors in New York, as Wall Street knows its refinement is always very pure and traceable. Note this mint saw an $8.3B uptick in sales in 2025 alone due to international political antics.

"The prohibition on gold ownership in the US was relaxed in 1964, and finally rescinded in 1977 when Gerald Ford signed proclamation Pub.L. 93-373."

However, during severe economic recession the US government has Nationalized private gold holdings >1oz in the past. Something like a 35% drop in markets due to a theoretical Magnificent 7 "AI" bubble correction does pose a nonzero risk.

Keep some Popcorn ready, as the price of Gold going any higher is getting weird. =3

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

That debt clock looks like a monopoly board. Lets be honest, the world economy has become one massive game of monopoly with big tech and big oil being the banks.

What would the founding fathers, the ghosts of the French Revolution or Plato say to that? Nothing, they’re all dead.

We should be doing the changing, not the long dead past.

> What would the founding fathers, the ghosts of the French Revolution or Plato say to that? Nothing, they’re all dead.

Well, the people are dead. Calling a ghost itself "alive" or "dead" is a categorical error.

There are different kinds of Death, and Socrates story of resolve still greatly affects peoples ideas of free speech and due process within a just rule of law.

Have a great day. =3

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod)

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

When did that happen? Are you talking about Breton Woods? Because if that’s the case, you got it completely wrong.

Think they'll have to - you can only switch to a "trust me bro" system once.

Do you think Germany would invade the US if they did it a second time? Or, what exactly would happen as a consequence to the US?

>what exactly would happen as a consequence to the US?

It would trigger a loss of faith in the US and USD. Which could get really spicy given that the US relies on reserve currency status to keep things steady despite comparatively high debt/gdp

Hard to tell what would happen but I suspect its borderline enough that nobody sane wants to find out

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

Can you provide some references to them doing this the first time? You seem to like posting comments about the "Nixon shock" without providing anything to back it up.

Sorry — I thought this was well known. Until 1971 a united states dollar was an IOU for a certain amount of gold. The US cheated by printing more IOUs than the amount of gold it had. When foreign countries started withdrawing gold at a rate the US thought it would run out, in 1971, it cancelled all IOUs and kept the remaining gold for itself.

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibi...

So you're referring to the end of the Bretton Woods System, which is its formal name.

> The US cheated by printing more IOUs than the amount of gold it had.

From the article you posted, it looks like the US was dealing with an issue whereby their reduction in global output meant that a reducing demand for dollars could cause a run on gold. I don't know if I would characterise this as "cheating" per se. The article states that there were many efforts, jointly between the US and other countries, to maintain the system, but these ultimately failed.

So I don't really get how this backs your claim that the US cheated? Sure it was controversial, and I'm sure there were many peoole who were unhappy about it, but it looks like they had little choice, given the system was failing and they were dealing with an extraordinary inflation crisis to boot.

If you've only printed enough dollars for the amount of gold you have, a run is no problem because you can exchange as much gold as people want. Gold and dollars can be allowed to be freely exchanged, no matter what. If you've cheated by printing more dollars than you have gold, then you have a problem.

this. Especially USA may use all those gold to build a Gold White House.

Or move it to Canada. One of the advantages of the US was that it was far from Europe and safe in case of invasion or war. The US clearly cant be trusted anymore , but Canada can, and it also across the atlantic.

The Netherlands has spread it's gold in London, Canada and New York.

This policy came from the late 1930s when secretly the government knew that Germany was likely going to invade.

Canada wouldn't be able to defend from an invasion

An invasion from who? I agree with you that Canada couldn't defend against an invasion from the US, but I also don't think that any country without nuclear weapons could defend against an invasion from the US. But I think that Canada could probably defend itself from an invasion from most other countries—the Canadian military is generally competent, and NATO and NORAD would almost certainly offer assistance.

Even then, who would want to invade Canada? Despite the recent political blustering, it seems incredibly unlikely that the US would invade Canada, and the only other plausible invader that I can think of right now is Russia, but their military isn't doing very well at all right now.

If the threat model is "the US goes rogue and does crazy stuff", Canada is a prime risk of suffering from such madness, so moving your resources there doesn't really change anything.

Agreed, but I'd argue that there's a big difference between the US making it difficult to access gold reserves stored there and invading/blockading Canada to the point where gold reserves stored there are unusable. The first seems unlikely but possible, while the second seems almost unimaginable, and even if the second does happen, I'd be more concerned about access to food/medicine than access to gold reserves.

(Although I'm Canadian, so this may perhaps just be wishful thinking on my part)

And dont give trump any more reasons.

If the USA cannot be trusted that they will honor the ownership of gold in their vaults, can it be trusted to honor the ownership of US equities and bonds held by foreigners?

At the moment you can't really trust the US with anything.

Obviously not.

Ray Dalio describes such actions as the beginning of the end.

It's kinda weird how Dalio has been predicting a fall for a while now.

He's described as a "permabear" on r/StockMarket and r/wallstreetbets. Common refrain is he could be right in principle, but getting the timing wrong can be the same as being wrong, for all practical purposes.

The timing matters if you want to make money off it. I'm just talking about how he was saying the US empire will fall a few years ago. Not the stock market.

I think it can also apply to how much credit we should give him if he ends up being right. If his predictions come true within the next decade, he'll be considered a prophet; if in the next half century, then not so much.

I don't have anything to go by for this, but I do wonder if there were any people who predicted the downfall of the Roman empire 200, 100, 50, etc years before it actually collapsed. I suspect all of them would have somehow based this on its decadence and excesses, but I also suspect none would have had a firm grasp on how it would play out.

I am similarly interested with such questions wrt to the US today.

The Roman Empire died in 1453 because the Ottoman Turks had gunpowder cannons. I am not anybody predicted that considering the Arabs could have likely finished off the Roman Empire immediately after finishing off the crusader states. The Mongols absolutely could have finished off the Roman Empire but just weren’t interested after bouncing off Palestine. Before that the early Muslims could have finished off the Roman Empire has Khalid Ibn Al Walid not been sacked by his cousin.

With so many near death experiences actually death was challenging to guess at.

Greenland thing and taking Russia side were beginning of the end. Lying about America never getting help was making the end loud and clear.

This is just Germans dealing with end being unavoidable.

The beginning of the end started when they came up with project 2025 really, they've been implementing what they said they would implement.

The beginning of the end started with Nixon. It allowed US to print whatever money and never default. I find it insane that the world went along with it. Seems like a parody.

It's what Carney's speech alluded to when he cited Havel's The Power of the Powerless [1]. The sign was put in the displays because it was the best thing to do for the vassal states. Those days are slowly ending, more and more countries are going to stop displaying the sign.

This is also what at least part of the Americans doesn't get. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc. weren't freeloaders, they were doing the bidding of the US in the UN, maintaining the system where the US can print money without limit, etc. All that soft power has been destroyed.

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

I hope they've identified US assets of equivalent value to immediately sieze if there's any funny business.

It would definitely be fun to watch Germany try to lift that sword.

Rammstein?

Rammstein is a band. Ramstein is the most important US military bases in Europe. I guess you meant the latter?

Thank you, was confused there for a second XD

Aha, yes!

Well, they did write this lyric around 2004:

(hook)

We′re all living in Amerika.

Amerika ist wunderbar.

We're all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

(verse)

Wenn getanzt wird, will ich führen,

auch wenn ihr euch alleine dreht.

Lasst euch ein wenig kontrollieren.

Ich zeige euch, wie es richtig geht.

Wir bilden einen lieben Reigen,

die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen.

Musik kommt aus dem Weißen Haus

und vor Paris steht Micky Maus.

(hook)

We're all living in Amerika.

Amerika ist wunderbar.

We′re all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

(verse)

Ich kenne Schritte, die sehr nützen,

und werde euch vor Fehltritt schützen.

Und wer nicht tanzen will am Schluss,

weiß noch nicht, dass er tanzen muss.

Wir bilden einen lieben Reigen,

ich werde euch die Richtung zeigen.

Nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus

und vor Paris steht Micky Maus.

(hook)

We′re all living in Amerika.

Amerika ist wunderbar.

We're all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

We′re all living in Amerika.

Coca-Cola, Wonderbra.

We're all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

(outro)

This is not a love song.

I don′t sing my mother tongue.

No, this is not a love song.

(hook)

We're all living in Amerika.

Amerika ist wunderbar.

We′re all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

We're all living in Amerika.

Coca-Cola, sometimes war.

We're all living in Amerika,

Amerika, Amerika.

I am absolutly certain (without knowing or checking), that many of the germans involved in putting there gold in US hands, did so "reluctantly". And now with panzers in the ukrain for the 3'rd time they are looking back overthere shoulders thinking right, general winter in front and our gold back there and how did they get in this mess anyway, reluctantly. Some of the men who mentored me, spoke of there experiences going ashore in France and pushing on into Germany, which they did at great personal cost, but in spite of that, enthusiasticly. Every time Russia publishes a "routine" update on there sovereign gold reserves it must make the euros twitch, with the germans developing a prounounced tick. which is all my way of saying that I can find no way to sympathise.

Given a certain President's thin skin, and inclinations toward dramatic and confrontational behavior - if the Europeans actually wanted their gold back, it should have been done very quietly. Probably with obfuscated paperwork, or other shell games or smokescreens.

Gold price is high, so why not just sell it?

Meanwhile Germany could silently buy gold at home and let the market handle where it comes from.

You also need to build the infrastructure to take on 1,000 tons of gold. I doubt that's done in a month. IIRC, London has the biggest storage after NYC, so that's probably where it'll end up in the interrim. Eventually, I'd guess Switzerland will rise to do more gold storage.

We're essentially creating the same scenario as WTI vs Brent oil, where gold is partitioned into multiple different products depending on location.

At that scale, I'd bet that selling (even if buying at home) would be obvious to professional traders in the gold market. And quickly hit the headlines.

Which is exactly the scenario you'd want to avoid, if you were concerned that a certain President might decide that "your" gold, locked in "his" vault, meant that he had you by the bars.

Germans. We (also European) thankfully already got our gold back.

The dividing line from alephnerdXMeyer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733802

https://magdamiu.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/13.png

"Frontman" reactions to Carneyism: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jim-csek-cpa-cma-10118726_thi...

(Lagarde= lower upper class?)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/courageous-carney-vs-deme...

https://www.ft.com/content/b4c07b4d-dd15-4a42-b744-ea4b5f696...

colorised*: https://imgflip.com/i/aidj8a (I also think it's remarkable that GR and ES now rate so deep blue; both were literally fascist within my lifetime)

upper middle? (went to good schools and even worked before public service, where she is known mostly for what she does)

* Goethe, eat your heart out. Colours from 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...

Vibe-stats'ing says this could have come from a decision tree (based on how the EDI was evaluated?) (XD)

https://blog.dailydoseofds.com/p/how-to-inspect-decision-tre...

U: https://www.smh.com.au/world/first-among-men-20140210-32amz....

>At 17, she spent a year as an exchange student at the same posh girls' school in Washington's suburbs that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended

> note that PCA components are not interpretable

If PCA components are not interpretable, but deep artificially-axis-aligned trees are, I think maybe we should reconsider the definition of "interpretable". (see also: curve fitting via thousands of piecewise linear lerps) Then again, we're projecting six dimensions down to two; might be interesting to see if there is a separating plane when the others are taken into account...

Note also that Lagarde is inner party, just not upper class — so there's an axis skew there as well. (or is she? "You never know if she personally agrees with what she has been asked to pursue." is clearly middle class, but does it also smack of outer party?)

[how many hundred words was this story? and yet it took 7382 lines of html to convey?]

EDIT: upon re-reading "Theory and Practice" I think we can comfortably assign Lagarde to the Inner Party. Both Inner and Outer Parties (unlike sociopaths vs clueless) must rely on doublethink, and EG says belief in the Party dicta actually rises as one rises within it (unlike upper vs middle.

Then again, even if the initial difference between Inner and Outer is one of exam scores (for which we'd call CMOL inner), she has been an outsider (for l'américaine was not an ENArque), and the practical difference between Inner and Outer seems to be that the former propose and the latter dispose (for which she is clearly not the head but the hands).

lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MPtXUeUznY

The biggest difference between L and a Kennedy, is that a K in her position is free to act unilaterally== without consulting the other IPs? (which echelon are the Kennedys, how aligned are they to the dicta)

Phyker: in what way are emo-x and confrontationality same-same but also different, but still the same? How to rotate in such a 2D space? Asking for a democracy.

https://youtube.com/shorts/pN9l-_EuAdM

Imker question?

(Okok I will get back to loA but I realized it was PH I was more interested in hooking after all XD

I could swear I've seen that style in a manga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom#/media...)

E: https://www.amazon.co.jp/T%E3%83%BB-%E3%83%BB%E3%83%AD%E3%83...

Seems like it was aimed at the shoujo XD

Whether it was the movie or it be the rumours, I would've figured not just shoujo but even BL? (we were speaking of Mann earlier and I see Tadzio [DiV] makes it into WP as a bishie)

Talk about choose your own adventure; that short leads into a bubble I rarely overlap (seems to be sticky on my ad feeds; excellent!)

Same same but different? "it was the sort of ski resort where young women went looking for husbands — and husbands went looking for young women..."

No idea how the K's are, but I suspect JFK would not have been cancelled if he had been behind, rather than in front of, his IP. ("pioneers get arrows in the back" is a hoary Imker saying)

Will ruminate on the rotation, but axes I can think of atm are freudian id<->superego (NL confro: "Normaal doen"?) and emphasis on the dyadic links instead of their atomic endpoints (JP as a place where —if you are lucky— you later get feedback on your behaviour as having being so out of hand and everyone was already so ashamed that mentioning it at the time would only have made everything much, much worse?)

https://www.science.org/content/article/robert-f-kennedy-jr-...

(Coopted!!)

Biophykers too? https://english.stackexchange.com/a/512733

Another Tadzio https://old.reddit.com/r/Quadrinhos/comments/1knqok7/porque_...

Precisely!! if you say of this resort

  #young women == #potential husbands + #husbands

The emotional punch gets lost

It could also be a matter of scaling a jury-system which haphazardly schools citizens in the art of getting emotional satisfaction from the rational arts (while staying within a Dunbar region of convergence)

Edit:also while not requiring kings to make uh forceful arguments

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

Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it

(Warning: not entirely unserious): https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/12%E4%BA%BA%E3%81%AE%E5%84%AA%...

(As you know, rotations can be managed with a finite number of reflections..)

U: HN encourage rebuttals to come from a place of experience.. how should that get mathsplained in terms of dyadic links?

mathsplaining: A rebuttal from a place of experience allows for the 2nd rebuttal (are re-buttals implicitly bi-assed?) to use a well-known dyadic sales technique, feel-felt-found:

   (objection X having been asserted based on experience)
   - I know you feel X
   - I felt X, too
   - But what I found was, Y...
   (which makes an argument from a[n artificially?]
   shared PoV, inviting the X-believer to "follow"
   the Y-asserter's signposted putative path to Y)

[exercise: explicate this trope in terms of "same same but diffelent"]

   d(Y,T) < d(X,T), where T is the truth

whenever there is T there is M from diffelent to same-same

--surely not Wyndham Lewis, even by way of Hugh Kenner (FH HN LA!!)

Q1: what pr(h)operty(TM) do pr(h)os associate with the M that aeb-kun is most interested in?

Q2: How would aeb-kun score this exercise!?

Q3: mid-low telegu p(r)op > mid Franco p(r)op?? (On account of stronger dyadic links ONLY)

https://youtu.be/7tTfL-DtpXk

(If aeb-kun didn't figure the source; that was not a core part of the ex)

Dark polycarbonate: for enlightenment by non-enlightenment XD

Dark polycarbonate is highly useful for looking anywhere near a weld pool without eye damage: shade <7 for gas processes, shade 10 for electric?

Q1. M is a vector, and therefore a section of the tangent bundle evaluated at a point? (whatever "tangent" may mean in this space — I'd guess if the geodesic YX doesn't follow a linear route in coordinates, then the coordinate vector of the initial part of that geodesic at Y?) If one can say both that what can be listened to, and that which will be able to be listened to, at the same time, it's gravy — normally one must say only that which can be listened to, and leave that which will be able to be listened to for a more felicitous future.

Q2. Nice!

Q3. need to match the telegu ref first; is there a back of the book?

https://youtu.be/aSPqIH7I-As

M is a functor (the "satirical functor" would still be an incorrect and sad answer?) was what I was thinking XD

Also: existence of glass stronger than Kevlar not just good and novel, it seems to be in our common TODO

Ok, if this is the best Franco could do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhPAZOwEY0I , his oestrous game was weak. (was "la la la" what was left after the censors got to the lyrics? I can't believe I listened to an entire spanish song and didn't hear "corazon" once.)

Tollywood >> Madrid

lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf-n7YfRKqc

EDIT: just listened to carlist, falangist, and legion songs, none of which have anything like "Vdrug svoyu smuglyanku / Ya v otryade povstrechal" — at best, she's at home, sewing uniforms?

Post-Schismatic

"Abundance gospel"

Haven't looked into it, EAB must (=wild conjecture) have felt solidarity with commie-slavs (still Orthodox in outlook) > Catalonians > UK upper-mid converts?

This other low-upper-mid (for Palo Alto?) Franco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Franco#Early_life

https://youtube.com/shorts/A5_mGha27H4

Aha! (if I ever had the chance with KJU, I think it'd be more likely to work with "D'W. Nuss vo Bümpliz geit dür d'Strass")

Maybe this Franco could help PH with foxwork?

As a Buxtonist (shorthand for committed-but-armed pacifist) Plato's choice of spirit animal has my vote*

Καὶ μὴν τό γε τῆς τοῦ κυνὸς φύσεως ἐπισκοπεῖν ἃ λέγομεν, ὅτι ὁ γενναῖος σκύλαξ, ὡς μὲν ἀστεῖος, πρὸς τοὺς γνωρίμους ἅπαντας

ἃ δὲ ἀλλοῖα, πρὸς τοὺς ἀγνῶτας.

Ὃ μὲν οὖν γιγνώσκει, φίλον: ὃ δ᾽ οὐ γιγνώσκει, ἐχθρόν. ... οὐκοῦν ... ὁ κύων ... φιλοσοφός; ... φιλομαθὴς γὰρ δή.

I look forward to PH Franco-in' it with Bessent, Hegseth or even the next dem favourite! (Some chance they'd share his taste in music?)

(In the spirit of Vickrey maybe) should I mention Carter's MEOW?

I admit it was a feint.. when I'd said "universal conscription" I had something like the CCC in mind, with medical exemptions redirected to nursing..

Now, I think SSSS would be a good patch..

   Service.Satire.Spectator-Sport

PS: MEOWs have a habit of lying flat, something I find endearing, but atm no way to incorporate that into the cosmogony

Diogenes' also!

(but I must admit I see a bit of a jump in the reasoning at:

— ὅτι τοῖς μὲν οἰκείοις καὶ γνωρίμοις ἥμερος, τοῖς δὲ ἀλλοτρίοις τοὐναντίον.

— πάνυ μὲν οὖν.

— καὶ μὴν ἥ γε τοῦ φιλοσόφου φύσις οὐκ ἄλλοσε τρέψεται. ἀλλὰ ὡς πρὸς τοὺς μὲν οἰκείους γνωρίμους τ᾽ ἄρα ἡμῖν, τοῖς δὲ ἀγνῶτας ἀλλοτρίους, τῷ ἀγνοεῖν τε καὶ γιγνώσκειν διοριεῖται. )

Do you have any Buxton'ish theories for ameliorating the mid-trust levels of your home country? I must also admit my original project was to come here to figure out what needed changing the Old Country, but kind of lost enthusiasm for that project after deciding early childhood education in the culture seemed to be key...

Our Minister for CCY believes in exchanging lessons with JP

But you seem to be asking for my offthewall Buxton 5-to-10 plans which could turn out to be offshoots of these

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40553071?

With that idiot a bullshit pretext might have done the trick.

"We just want to have it for a bit to polish it to ensure it is shiny. It's a requirement of German law under Saftsack gesetz 35.6"

Did you not mean the Goldbarrenglänzungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz 35.6?

"The German Bundespräsident want to add a new gold-plated ballroom to his residence, we have to melt all the gold."

Idk man, these things are hilarious, I for one enjoy seeing Trump having toddlers tier meltdown on video every now and then. That's why I keep watching his live speeches, that and in the hope his body finally gives up in glorious 4k 60 fps

The more he pushes us away with his deranged tantrums the more independence we are forced to build, it's a win-win really

He eats McDonalds everyday and does 0 exercise. Imagine how long he'd live if he ate healthy and exercised daily.

He also only gets a few hours of sleep. I wonder if that’s part of why his behavior is so unhinged.

Why not just … sell the gold? What good is gold to a society anyway, regardless of where it is placed?

Instead of drawing the anger of the US, just .. slowly over time, sell all the gold off, and move the money back. And use it to build infrastructure or something. Much better than gold.

I can imagine the next big budget heist movie being written about this as we speak.

An armada of ships traversing the Atlantic with 1K tonnes of gold being waylaid in the middle of the ocean by a huge storm when unidentified submarines bore a hole in the cargo ship and make off with the gold: Oceans 15.

Even India recently has repatriated some of its foreign gold reserves (from Bank of England (and possibly other places)):

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-29/india-cen...

It's probably too late. They should have heeded the wisdom of Charles de Gaulle:

https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/10/05/why-france-repat...

Is there any point to a country having gold reserves? What is it being kept for? (Genuine questions, looking for factual answers)

Stores of value are, for the most part, societal constructs. Anything has value as long as there is somebody willing to exchange something of theirs for it. That's also what makes value intangible as there is a built-in subjectivity in this.

Gold falls into the category "has always had value, so it will always have value" type of thoughts. And that's just what gives it value, out confidence that we can exchange it for something when you need it.

It's almost the definition of a store of value. If it was actually useful it's called a strategic reserve, like for oil.

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

> A strategic reserve can be ... A commodity, such as intervention stocks of food or petrol ...

> Examples of commodity reserves: Global strategic petroleum reserves ... Gold reserve

Gold has a few properties: one is that it has had value through history and another is that it’s a physical asset, and because of these two properties, it’s quite liquid. It’s also a metal that doesn’t naturally corrode.

Central banks of countries hold various kinds of assets, including bonds and currencies of other countries. But bonds and currencies are just “paper”…or are more vulnerable than gold to shocks in certain conditions.

The disadvantage of physical gold is that it doesn’t generate any income by itself, as compared to bonds.

During times of higher uncertainty, people and institutions (including central banks) flock to gold.

Central banks do a lot of things, including buying and selling currency with foreign partners. If you’re trading using weak or unstable currencies, gold may be a useful alternative.

Intangible financial systems rest (simplistically speaking) on fundamental concepts of trust and reliability (aka what I expect to happen will happen).

Once these factors start to breakdown, all these intangible forms of holding wealth loose value. Gold remains as a significant reliable long term store of value.

Hence it’s worth maintaining by a nation.

It can be used as a collateral for loans, last resort for currency buybacks, emergency resource in times of war... Mostly it's a reputational tool to inspire faith in the country's creditworthiness.

Ask Russia, they are making bank on it. Especially with the rubble not being worth much.

Are they? I would have thought that Russia's oil exports to countries that are ignoring/bypassing sanctions are far more valuable to them.

Of course, but the price increase of gold made their reserves that much more valuable. The worth of their gold reserves increased by 200B since 2022.

I wonder what they'd do if the US starts reducing NATO commitments. A perception that Europe is using financial blackmail to keep the US in NATO would have interesting effects on US politics.

Anyway, it's been clear to me that this sort of thing was Trump's plan all along. The goal is massive and permanent reduction in the size of the federal government. If that requires crashing the US ability to borrow more money, and crashing the value of the dollar, that's a price he's willing to make the US pay. US reputation abroad is of absolutely no importance to him; indeed, it's a negative, since a positive reputation allows borrowing that sustains the large federal government he hates.

The lesson for Europe is that depending on the US to defend them was a poisonous mistake, even if a very seductive one.

A post-crash US would be poorer, but also much more economically competitive. This would tend to encourage investment, so it's an interesting question how far the dollar would actually decline.

I wouldn't want to be in South Korea or Taiwan (or Japan, really) in this scenario.

Trump likes to frame is as if Europe said: "Please, USA, protect us, and we will just parasite on you and abuse our relationship to our advantage". Whereas in fact the whole story is the other way round. For example there were limits on the size of German army not that long time ago. And the USA did everything so that its interests are well represented n Europe. Now that Trump plays his "We don't need anyone" theme, the former allies of the USA are forming their own alliances, reduce spending in the USA and no longer feel obliged to turn a blind eye on things that were bothering them for decades.

The only reason why other countries sent their soldiers to stupid wars in Afghanistan and Irak that made no sense then and make no sense now was because they were honoring their commitments and saying OK, we send people to die but if the worst come and Russia attacks us, The USA will do their part. Now Trump openly says all this was for nothing. All trust in the USA is gone as nobody knows what Trump does when he wakes up next day. So we quietly work on making the best of the current situation.

I'm less interested in performative statements and more interested in underlying motivations and incentives. It's not a question of who is "right" but of what the actors get out of it.

Of course Europe was leaning on US defense. This enabled resources to be diverted to social spending instead, something that has become all the more vital as populations age. And it's not clear what the US gets out of defending Europe now. There's no perceived Soviet juggernaut and Russia can't even conquer Ukraine.

> There's no perceived Soviet juggernaut and Russia can't even conquer Ukraine.

It looks a bit like that to be the case, but legally Russia still isn't at war with the Ukraine, according to their own internal law. Hence the use of mercenaries and "volunteers" and the pinky promise that conscripts are not used near the Ukraine.

> Europe was leaning on US defense. This enabled resources to be diverted to social spending instead

While each of these statements seems true, there is an imprecise implication that the USA was sponsoring Europe's social security. There are several problems with this implication, starting from the fact that the USA wanted to be present in Europe and benefited from it. Sure, increasing military budgets means less money is available for other things, including social spending, but increasing it from 2% to 5% like they're doing now or even 9% doesn't mean that Europe stops offering free healthcare and education to its citizens. So while I understand why Trump is promoting this narrative, it is his typical lie.

> depending on the US to defend them was a poisonous mistake, even if a very seductive one.

It was a decision that was necessary to not loose the second world war to Germany and/or the Sovietunion. Until 30 years ago separating from the US would have meant allowing the Sovietunion to expand to the Atlantic. Separating from the US has been an open discussion for the last 30 years, but it was always felt to be a security risk and the US has actively used its soft power to remain the status quo.

Sell. It's the cheapest option vs. moving (high risk). $164 billions would make a nice investment into infrastructure without touching their "Sondervermögen".

Selling that amount of gold would crash the price, devaluing their other reserves too.

What they have to do is move, but quietly, without announcing it.

Not all at once, obviously.

Gold is moved around the world all the time

Yet it's costly -- albeit they might get special conditions.

I hold Xetra Gold (tax free gains after 12mon). Some argue it's safe, because it can be delivered to the relationship bank: it's not really, it's uneconomical, at least for average Joe (~3% up to ~20% of value, heavily depending on denomination).

I seriously doubt the US will honor this, and will likely just keep the gold for itself.

It is a profoundly untrustworthy country.

de-risking from the United States is the only choice for anybody who cares about national interests. The question is how to do it on the quiet, and not trigger Trump into another rage tweeted escalation.

Just not talking about it and doing it slowly seems to work? E.g. one of the Dutch pension funds has pulled 1/3rd of their investment of US bonds (10/30 billion) since early 2025. They won't talk about, you'll only see it in their public records/reports. They re-invested the money in Dutch and German bonds.

yeah this is probably the way. One of the features of fascism is general incompetence, springing from destruction of state capacity in favour patronage networks.

I've heard all the gold is headed for Singapore nowdays

Just cash it out. They'll never get it back

I agree that they will never get the gold back, but is it really more likely that the US hands over that sum in cash?

This is the end

Hold your breath and count to ten

lol I doubt the US will honor this agreement.

It is a profoundly untrustworthy country.

Another question is why germany owns $530B worth of gold in the first place. This gold isn't backing a currency in any sense, if that is even how we still think about gold and currencies today. The opportunity cost of holding this amount of gold is immense.

Good luck with that.

Wait, I've watched this episode before. The US owed France large amount of gold (the legal mechanism for this was called "the dollar"). France asked to redeem their dollars for gold, and the US said "nah, we're keeping it, enjoy your dollars".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#American_policy_re...

That was the end of the US dollar convertibility to gold. This, unless I'm mistaken is actual French property held in US vaults.

The fear in non-US nations is that the US will not respect the agreements and refuse to hand over the gold if requested. Given all the Trump admin is doing, I don't think it's unjustified

Tangentially related to the above Wikipedia article: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

"Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation." yeahhh thanks Tricky Dick, how did that work out for us...? :D

To be clear: I find Trump contemptible. But I also try to understand why (powerful) people act the way they do, beyond the surface-level explanations.

The gold discussion imho misses the point if it’s reduced to “Trump is unhinged.”

What we just saw at Davos with Greenland reveals the actual pattern: the theatrics are the tool, not the objective. The erratic behavior generates uncertainty, which then gets converted into bargaining leverage.

With Greenland, Trump just demonstrated how this works: maximum escalation (tariff threats against a NATO partner), then “backing down” in exchange for concessions (“total and permanent access”). The result is a structural shift - Europe becomes more dependent on US decisions in the Arctic, not less.

The second-order effect: coercive bargaining within the Western alliance becomes normalized. Once you’ve done this with Denmark, the threshold drops for similar tactics on other issues - tech regulation, China policy, financial infrastructure.

The third-order effect for German gold: the real question isn’t whether Trump is “crazy enough” to freeze gold reserves. The question is what negotiating leverage the mere possibility creates. Even if the probability is 5% - what concessions would Germany make to bring that risk down to 0%? That’s the actual logic: the more everyone believes he might do it, the more he can “sell” not doing it.

The economists aren’t arguing that (or if) confiscation is likely. They’re arguing that the risk is no longer negligible enough to ignore - and that the cost-benefit calculation of storing it there has fundamentally shifted.

Why do people continue attributing 4D chess to Trump? He is an egomaniac and just wants to be one of the few presidents that added land to the US (similar to being one of the few presidents who won the Nobel Peace Prize). He has said as much as it being 'psychological' to him.

So, he made the threats. Stocks start going down, bond yields start going up. Perhaps surprising to him there is a unified reaction from EU countries, the trade bazooka is on the table. More rational actors in his entourage/broligachy start to get worried, advising him to find a landing site. Along comes Mark Rutte who offers him a landing site that sounds great, but does not improve much over his starting position, but actually made it worse (there will be non-US NATO arctic troops on Greenland, not just 4 dog sleds or whatever he is always rambling about).

The longer-term damage for the US is much bigger. Tech sovereignty just moved to the top of the EU agendas and companies and government will move away from US tech, to a loss of hundreds of billions of income in the longer term.

Some 4D chess move...

Following incentives isn’t 4D chess. Still we can acknowledge that they exist even if they’re perverse and that even retarded moves sometimes pay off or appear to pay off, in some way in some term. Nobody is calling Trump a genius.

> With Greenland, Trump just demonstrated how this works: maximum escalation (tariff threats against a NATO partner), then “backing down” in exchange for concessions (“total and permanent access”). The result is a structural shift - Europe becomes more dependent on US decisions in the Arctic, not less.

What concessions? Can you name one thing that Trump got that the US did not have before?

If these actually are attempts at some sort of “the art of the deal” manipulation, they are failing catastrophically. He is achieving nothing while destroying the soft power the US benefited from since WW2.

> The second-order effect: coercive bargaining within the Western alliance becomes normalized

What? What does that even mean? Do you realize how hand-wavey this sounds? With this kind of vague ex-post rationalization totally blind to any negative consequences of the supposed “bargaining”, you could sanewash literally any action. Trump shoots the Prime Minister of Norway on live TV? He just wanted to promote better security of the Western leaders.

Someone else in this thread talks about the supposed lack of awareness of “the art of the deal” meme. No, I am aware of the “4D chess” theory to explain Trump’s behavior. I just don’t think it matches the observation. I think the “malignant narcissist with emotional maturity of an 8-year-old” works much better.

BTW, I like how Emily Maitlis talks about Trump’s “achievements” in Davos - it brings a bit of much-needed levity to the situation: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/34yP2X-nZCk

The only thing he accomplished was making america look like a fool again.

>What we just saw at Davos with Greenland reveals the actual pattern: the theatrics are the tool, not the objective. The erratic behavior generates uncertainty, which then gets converted into bargaining leverage.

He said this in his book The Art of the Deal, released in 1987. It’s been his playbook for all political campaigning and both terms of his presidency. It’s a meme to point this out in certain right leaning circles.

I was frustrated by the lack of awareness about this for awhile. I still am but I understand now that the media is also playing their part and doing their role. It’s absolutely justified - these ridiculous claims and arguments generate clicks, attention, revenue.

It’s something that should be kept in mind by the average voter though, and in social media discussion. Everyone wants you to be emotionally invested. Trump wants you to commit so he can pump fake tou, and the media gets solid quarterly numbers

War is coming. Act accordingly

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