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Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, 59 tonnes of gold was sold in USA and bought in London. So that means perhaps "Somebody" transferred 59 tonnes of their gold holdings to the USA.. who was that?

This is similar to what the French did last year.

The other thing I noticed, is that as the article chose to mention:

> Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standards

with implication being that the gold it previously held in the USA was not meeting those standards, but is that just journalistic fluff? what are those standards? (could be exact weights in g rather than purity?)

NB the Netherlands still has >200 tonnes of gold held in the USA & Canada.

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The standards of purity have changed over time, and most of the US gold dates from before the 1930s; and so a lot of US-domiciled gold have different purities that don't follow the current international standard. The purity requirement has been going up over time. A lot of US gold is 90% gold and 10% copper, but gold traded on the international market needs to be at least 99.5% pure. Here [1] is a good breakdown.

[1] https://www.bficapital.com/blog/what-is-inside-fort-knox

One important detail here.

When you buy gold, you purchase based on the amount of gold, not the total amount of alloy. This is true in both markets. This difference in standard is practically not a big deal because you very rarely physically move the gold, as moving gold requires a lot of security and is a risk.

> requires a lot of security and is a risk

and has a cost

I’m not sure 100% sure, but I imagine the cost of transporting to Europe is probably higher than the cost of refining to the European standard.

Switzerland has 4 of the 15 biggest gold refineries in the world in 2026

https://vinodvsharma.com/top-15-biggest-gold-refineries-in-t...

Yeah, I know most of the gold that goes to Europe from the US usually gets refined in Switzerland.

I have no idea what portion of the total cost that is to move gold from US to Switzerland. I imagine it’s less than the insured carrier service.

You're reading way to much into this.

Physical gold bars are transferred via plane between London and New York every day. The gold flies in the cargo holds of regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights. The quantity transferred depends on demand, and could be several metric tons daily.

This is nothing unusual. Dubai is another major gold transfer hub, and it operates via the same mechanism.

Regarding the article highlighting differing international standards for gold, London uses standard 400-ounce bars, while the US uses 100-ounce or 1kg bars. Often, the bars need to be remelted (elsewhere, typically in Switzerland) before they can be added to the vaults.

Again, nothing unusual.

Is gold really sufficiently fungible to enable daily bidirectional sizable flows across the Atlantic, but not fungible enough to allow somebody to net these flows out and save at least one way of the airfare?

Coordination cost maybe. If you're transferring A -> B and C <- D, but A and C or B and D don't know each other or even dislike each other, it's going to be hard to even get them to talk about the fungibility of the actual bars. And I bet airfare is the cheapest part after all the security and paychecks of people arranging the transaction.

Yes. Gold is fungible only within the same custodian.

Many people buy (normally small) gold bars only to discover that they can't sell them back by the same price.

That is the spread which the gold dealers have to make a profit. But bullion is bullion anywhere you turn and no matter to who you sell. No gold dealer will turn down investment grade gold.

> No gold dealer will turn down investment grade gold.

For sure. As long as you pay the laboratory fee up front to prove that the thing you have is investment grade...

Never have a gold dealer anywhere asked me for any laboratory fee when selling bullion to them. They have their spread and that's it. It's their job to recognize bullion and have their own laboratory to quickly check if needed.

Most of this is googleable but there are thousands of traders that make sure the gold price is the same globally so nobody had to “move” their gold in the reverse for this trade to work.

The difference between London and the US is that the bars are of different size (12.5 vs 1kg).

> there are thousands of traders that make sure the gold price is the same globally so nobody had to “move” their gold

Physical versus contract differences are real and require moving the actual gold. What most users do is sell deliverable where they want it out and then buy contracts or deliverable where they want it and then let the market figure out how to move gold around to settle. (It probably won’t involve moving gold from where you had it to where you want it unless you’re in a cohort.)

The price of gold is not equal globally, there is a ‘loco swap’ price differential, reflecting the price of moving the metal, eg flights, security, tariffs that may be attracted, whether the location can service futures delivery etc

Where in the world can you buy gold cheaper than anywhere else? Because if you knew that you would become a multimillionaire in a few weeks.

> Interestingly, 59 tonnes of gold was sold in USA and bought in London. So that means perhaps "Somebody" transferred 59 tonnes of their gold holdings to the USA.. who was that?

That 59T could have been someone that decided to starting owning gold for the very first time, so 'net-new' holding rather than a 'transfer'. The 59T could have also been multiple parties and not an individual "somebody": we only know that it was 59T from the sell side (NL).

USA & Canada

I know the above was in the article, but please never mention the US and Canada in the same breath. Please.

That & symbol just irritates.

From a Canadian's perspective, it's like mentioning a sophisticated, decent human being, and a slimy smarmy used car salesman, in the same breath.

Please.

We all have shitty neighbors, okay

West coast calling:

What if you annexed us? We have beaches and it’d more than double your economy.

East coast:

Oh hey that’s not fair, we have equal amounts of beaches, the water is just a different color. You are going down with us..

Middle America: good luck eating when we cut off both of your food supplies.

Now both of you go stand in a corner until you are ready to work together to take down the government that has us all acting this way.

California alone grows about half of the US's nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Both the West Coast and rest of the country could reconfigure production to serve themselves if desired.

Californian here. I live in hope.

We can do more than hope: Move the wall from the southern border to the eastern border (and probably embargo whatever oil rigs and space launch platforms are planned for places like Monterey Bay)

That way, we can get to keep our beaches, and continue to hire migrant labor from the rest of America to help during harvest season.

Sadly I can't imagine the US letting go of all the Pacific ports and home to Pacific fleet. At best you might draw a line above LA county.

I wouldn't call Canadians smarmy, just a bit overly friendly.

Canadians are not that bad.

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