Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 hours ago
> Banks can keep it in US and stay happy
If the Banque de France holds physical in New York and sells it to JPMorgan (nothing moves) and then in Paris buys contract for physical from UBS, there will probably need to be physical gold that moves.
In all likelihood, Swiss gold held by e.g. a Gulf customer might be sold to Paris (nothing moves) and JPMorgan may entice Venezuela to take those contracts on its balance sheet (nothing moves). But if it’s a big trade, the price of delivering physical in Paris (or Genève) will go above spot in New York at which point it’s profitable for JPMorgan to take delivery, load up planes and physically ship gold.
I imagine a convoy of small but heavily armored ships leaving New York, with nervous sailors clutching machine guns on the decks.
You wouldn't need many ships. The volume of a single shipping container is enough for 1300 tons of gold. Of course gold is extremely heavy, you'd need a specially built container to support that much gold, but the point is the storage space of any ocean going ship can comfortably carry the entire gold reserve of an entire country.
If you actually loaded gold into shipping containers and obeyed the weight restrictions, all the gold in the world would take up less than 8400 TEU, which would be considered a mid size cargo ship.
> I imagine a convoy of small but heavily armored ships
It’s typically flown [1].
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
And in the past it has been shipped in boxes labelled "fish"[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fish
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Not that that stops heist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...
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This actually happened in 1965. De Gaulle, the president of France at the time, sent the French Navy over to America and took their reserve gold back home. This prompted other countries to do the same and by 1971 America had switched from a gold standard to a fiat currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
To supplement this, there was an interesting situation in 2025 [0] where a financial signal developed and we saw physical gold flows from London to New York. A very similar mechanism; governments do something, price signal develops, gold starts flying around.
[0] https://www.usagold.com/gold-arbitrage-trade-winds-down-amid...
agree with one minor quibble:
> load up planes and physically ship gold.
they would not load planes, they’d load ships, because it’s much cheaper.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134694 Since you two seems to disagree. Unless it’s a case of different volumes needing different transport.