Comment by ivolimmen
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
Their goal isn't only safe storage, it's also being able to sell when needed.
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.
> 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.
More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
London has an old school gold exchange. Pretty much you can buy and sell by moving a part between vaults (at least that's how I understood it to work in the past). Now I expect it to be just a spreadsheet but who knows.
My understanding is that it’s on shelves in a shared vault and you relabel who owns that shelf/slot/bin.
I wonder if anyone checks the gold. You could end up with the problem Amazon had, where people were inserting fake items into the supply chain and then it was just getting mixed into the real products and nobody could tell who was doing the fraud.
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.
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like moving a file on a drive
England is a European country. Just not EU.
England is a country in Europe.
Geographically, yes, but that's not very important.
London is still the financial hub in the Europe
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It was apparently important enough for the OP to try and draw a distinction when none was needed…
I’m surprised why they don’t just move it back to their own country and put it in a safe in Netherland.
The biggest chunk is in the Netherlands, but you want your gold also in other countries, so that you can still access is (and don't loose it) in case of an invasion. Hence almost half is in North America, a completely different (and (somewhat) allied) continent.
It's also easier to sell in certain markets, such as London.
Not just so that you don't lose it in case of an invasion, but it is proof that you would be willing to help out the host country in the case they were invaded. Also, that you would not invade them.
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.
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Just to be a pedant, 18.5 % in the US and same in Canada so 37%.
I wouldn't call that almost half, it used to be about half before the move (NY at 31.3, 19.7 in Canada).
England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe".
(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).
The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name and yet calling itself American is almost comical in its ineptitude.
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.
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.
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> The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name
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.
One of the smart moves the EU has performed is to bring all ideas of Europeanness and European identity and Europe as a continent under its exclusive umbrella. Even places like Switzerland are somehow now defined by their exclusion when you couldn’t get a more European country slap bang in the centre of the continent. 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.
is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
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.
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> One of the smart moves the EU has performed is to bring all ideas of Europeanness and European identity and Europe as a continent under its exclusive umbrella.
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.
Most Americans refer to their country as 'the U.S.'. The people I most hear referring to it as 'America' are Brits.
Too bad that MUSGA never caught on then.
Gulf of America, Lake America, ...
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Americans are from the United States of America in the same way Mexicans are from the United States of Mexico.
When South Americans refer to Americans as "estadounidense" is that imperialist Mexico erasure? The USA is not the only "United States" in North America.
In all fairness, I deal with British tourists a lot and they always talk about "going to Europe" when they refer to their summer holiday in Benidorm.
I don't think that's a problem, and it doesn't mean that Britain is not in Europe, IMO. Comes naturally with human perspective. "Where did you go this summer?" A) "I stayed in England"; B) "I travelled around Britain"; C) "I went to Europe". All perfectly understandable, I think..
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But almost invariably in this context they mean "the continent" ie France, Spain, Italy and so on, probably not Scandi and not Ireland. So that's more like how people would say they're going "to the UK" when actually they're travelling to like the Isle of Man or even sometimes Jersey which are not in the UK but like sure, people who speak English live there, if some lunatics attacked them the military forces would work for the UK, and in Man's case it even makes geographical sense (Jersey is basically in France, it isn't French for historical reasons) but these places are not part of the United Kingdom any more than Canada or Australia. Same King, different government.
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yea but that's clear from the context
we use "going to Europe" and "going to the continent" fully aware that the UK is in Europe
I live in continental Europe, and we also say "going to Europe" when talking about holiday trips abroad. It's just a natural thing to say when you want to stress you're going outside of the border, buy without being overly specific.
We are nothing, if not needlessly complex!
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the locals refer to SF proper as “The City” (not “Frisco”.)
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.
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French Guiana is part of America and of European Union.
> (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).
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).
We say "America", because "United States of America" isn't really a name. Just like we say England or Britain, because "United Kingdom" isn't really a name either.
"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.
The narrative is that the continent is going to be overrun by Russia (at the rate of mile per year like in Ukraine). So the elites think they need the gold in London to pay for their exile government luxury.
No, that isn't the narrative.