Hacker News Reader

Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

They can also sell it in the US, buy it in Europe, as France did. It's also the preferable route because IIRC the Chinese have had suspicions about the quality of their gold holdings held in the US for sometime now. That is, US-stored gold is not of the same quality grade as in the rest of the world.

View on HN

The usual claim, which is difficult to prove without physical access to the bars, is that some bars were made by melting and casting the confiscated gold coins that FDR gathered in the 1930s.

Such bars would not be to the 99.9 percent gold standard set by the London Bullion Market Association. They would instead be at about 90% purity, since American gold coins had 10% copper added, which makes the gold harder and more wear-resistant.

See https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/bundesbank... however, no explanation is given, only that the bars were melted, purified and then recast.

The Deutsche Bundesbank has a long list of every single gold bar in their possession (including those currently stored in GB and USA), including their weight (to 0.1 gram) and purity (at least 995/1000 as far as I can tell).

https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/743058/9869caef634ce... - Federal Reserve Bank of New York starts at page 2016 (PDF:2019)

I don't read German well and don't care to run this through a translator, but this is fascinating. I wonder how this list was compiled, by whom, and when it is used (is the gold audited)? You could randomly sample bars from the list to check the status of the gold periodically. I'm curious if other countries maintain similar lists.

I don't think they regularly audit the gold bars. But according to an article I read, the German Bundesbank used these lists to check off each of the bars transferred between 2013 and 2017 (when they transferred ~ 300 tons each from Paris and New York¹). Back then, they brought the gold bars to Germany, weighed them at multiple checkpoints, and melted them here. AFAIK, no discrepancies between list and actual weight/fineness were found.

I think this list is not only used for internal audits but also to assure the public and banks that Germany indeed knows in detail where its gold is stored.

¹) https://www.bundesbank.de/de/aufgaben/themen/bundesbank-schl... (in German)

Yeah, gold that hasn't been audited but only records held by USA's "Trust me bro"s.

> US-stored gold is not of the same quality grade as in the rest of the world

... to put it mildly. Nobody has audited the gold in decades and even its owners (banks of foreign countries) are not allowed to inspect it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com