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.
You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. The reserve at the Bank of England is put there because there is a large market for gold trading there. So you can use the gold immediately to influence the markets.
Putting it in a safe place in another European country wouldn't have added value over storage in Zeist.
More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
Because instead of treating each item as an individual thing, they were pooling everything with other items of the same type. So if I send in a brick and say it’s an iPhone 17 and you order an iPhone 17, you might get my brick.
Its audits only look at a tiny percentage of the holdings at a time, any kind of weighing or purity inspection is the exception rather than the rule, and third-party auditors or observers are not welcome. They basically look at a handful of bars, see that the seals on the other vaults are intact, and extrapolate that all the gold is perfectly fine.
In other words: the US could be pulling the fraud of the century here, and we'd never find out. But a full audit would be extremely expensive, there's no sign that there's any kind of foul play, and other countries are doing more-or-less the same.
And even if a country does notice that something is off with their US holdings, there's plenty of reason to keep it quiet and just play along.
I've no idea what checks are done to exclude such artifacts from gold storage. If somebody accepted them and stacked them in a reserve vault, they might go decades without discovery.
I guess it's not something to worry about. It's improbable, and even so, if everybody agrees on the value of undetected bogus W/Au ingots, makes no difference from the real thing.
It's also easier to sell in certain markets, such as London.
In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
I wouldn't call that almost half, it used to be about half before the move (NY at 31.3, 19.7 in Canada).
(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).
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.
That is not the reason.
People say that Columbus discovered America. They don't mean the country, they mean the continent. The people in the continent of America are called Americans. About a century ago, US Americans came to view America as two continents.
Many countries still hold to America being a single continent, but there's no name for the people of America because US Americans stole it. The is very equivalent to how the EU is stealing Europe/European.
Ugh, your concept of EU is closer to the USSR or maybe current Russia than to the actual EU. I sincerely hope that such nightmarish concept will never prevail over the relative sanity that we have now.
But only the most imbecille people have fallen for that. Nobody with any kind of sense or basic knowledge considers EU to be Europe or vice versa.
> Britain has always been an outlier due to being an island hanging off the edge, and is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
Just like they were last time, but they won that war in the end.
A) "I stayed in England"
B) "I travelled around Britain"
C) "I went to Europe"
I'm being highly pedantic here.
Which we all know, is the best kind of correct.
we use "going to Europe" and "going to the continent" fully aware that the UK is in Europe
So, they may live in Cupertino, Palo Alto, or Oakland, but when they say “we’re going to The City for a concert on Saturday!” we can hear them pronounce those capital letters as an unambiguous reference to the one, true City.
Eh, they also say “I’m going to SF”
But agreed definitely not “Frisco”
When South Americans refer to Americans as "estadounidense" is that imperialist Mexico erasure? The USA is not the only "United States" in North America.
See? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575360
Were not Americans, we are United Statesians!
Don't be a ghoul.
"The Soviet Union" wasn't really a name either, as "soviet" just means a governing council. But since it's a foreign word it sounds like a name.
It's interesting that some of the historically most powerful entities don't have proper names.
As for England being European, is it really? Traditionally people don't always count the Nordic countries as Europe, and I'd assume the same would be true of England? Culturally it is of course, just as much as France or Germany.
Hmm, maybe I should be pro-imperialism. I’ll do that before calling a Brazilian, Canadian, or Mexican an American to satisfy the whims of the language police.
But if you want to go to uni and call Americans United Statesians and fight a made up culture war, you’re certainly free to do that (in America at least, wherever that is).
Sounds like a culture warrior