Comment by Gravityloss
10 hours ago
I imagine a convoy of small but heavily armored ships leaving New York, with nervous sailors clutching machine guns on the decks.
10 hours ago
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
Alas, goldfish wouldn’t be invented until 1962 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish_(cracker)
Not that that stops heist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Pearson_International_...
A real black eye for the regional police. 10-15 million spent on investigation, maybe 1 million recovered, and a few flunkies in prison.
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
You're leaving out some really interesting context there. After the Great Depression the economic equilibrium the world settled into, with the Bretton Woods treaty, is that participating countries, which was most of the non-Soviet aligned world, would agree to base their currency's value on the USD.
That'd obviously give the US an immense amount of power, so in exchange the US would agree to make the USD convertible to gold at a fixed rate by other countries (as opposed to e.g. individuals). So the whole point here is that if the US tried to print a whole bunch of money to exploit our 'exorbitant privilege', countries would be able to take their now devaluing USD and exchange into a gold at a stable rate and make a whole bunch of money. So it was intended to be a self correcting system.
The problem is that the US did print a whole bunch of money anyhow, and when France and other countries said 'hey we'd like to convert our USD to gold' we just said 'nah' and defaulted on our obligations, bringing Bretton Woods to an end in 1971. That signaled the beginning of the modern completely fiat economic system, and led to some wild quotes from the time. For instance the Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon (who was president in 71) has a great quote of, 'The dollar is our currency, but your problem.'
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It's critical to understand this history to understand what's happening today with countries increasingly seeking to replace the dollar. Many want something akin to Bretton Woods 2.0, but without any country being given a win button. And that's not so easy to devise!
India brought several tonnes back from London. Approximately 250T was brought back in 100% cases it was brought from totally ordinary cargo planes. From what I have heard, hardest part of securing customs exemptions at port of entry in India.