Comment by Gravityloss
8 hours ago
I imagine a convoy of small but heavily armored ships leaving New York, with nervous sailors clutching machine guns on the decks.
8 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