I wonder how much of that are foreign central banks moving their gold reserves out of the USA... France, The Netherlands and Germany have been moving gold.
If central banks sell their gold in the US and buy new gold abroad (to save themselves physically transporting the gold across the ocean[0]), I suspect that the demand this creates for gold abroad will ultimately cause US gold exports to rise, too.
When Trump screwed with the tariffs we saw exactly that. Arbitrarily messing with tariffs is one of the risks that causes people to think keeping gold in the US is not entirely safe.
France completely exited New York, the Netherlands roughly halved what they've stored there. That was in 2026. They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe.
Germany moved 111t from New York in 2016, and, afaict, nothing since then. There's still 1236t left.
Italy also keeps over 1000t in New York (no plans for repatriation).
Banks can keep it in US and stay happy, they don't necessarily immediately need physical gold. So it's quite efficient, lots of govts do similar stuff.
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.
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.
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.'
---
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!
> 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!
The hard part is getting countries to agree on one system. Coming up with a good one is easy. You can either do EU style governance where countries vote on policy or go hands off and anchor everything to crypto.
> hard part is getting countries to agree on one system
To put it bluntly, America ended WWII with a global nuclear monopoly and then only industrial base on the planet that hadn't been bombed into smithereens. That put it in a unique position to set the terms of the peace. The only party that came out with any comparable leverage was the USSR on account of its massive army and willingness to maintain a wartime economy that would have been untenable in the democracies of the West. (Absent the USSR, it's again unlikely Bretton-Woods would have emerged–the Soviet threat created an incentive to coöperate.)
More than that, the end of WWII saw American complete its then priority of decolonization. That meant there were lots of newly created countries, not quite peacefully but not at the level of violence that usually accompanies new-country formation (with obvious exceptions, e.g. Partition and Israel/Palestine), that could be wooed with riches and ideology.
The alternative that was the ICU with an international reserve would punish surplus nations and help deficit nations. A Bretton Woods 2.0 thus would be advantageous to the US while neutralizing much of the advantageous the EU and China have as export based economies.
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.
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.
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.
No; but the volumes are tiny and the cost of freight is not very high. If I were talking about moving gold I would expect it to be flown because the risk of piracy would be too high. It is easier to plan, secure and monitor a flight.
I’ve found a few references for air but none for recent (2022-2026) sea movements yet. This article talks about illicit gold concentrates moving by sea but notes:
“In focussing almost exclusively on gold bars, jewellery, and high-grade recycled gold (over 40% purity), all of which generally travel by air, analysts have tended to disregard the maritime space as a significant arena for illicit gold flows (LBMA, 2022[9]).”
The Hong Kong gold vault stores at the airport, not the harbour:
“ Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”
> “Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”
This makes it sound like emergency delivery of gold is important. “Quick, we need to get 20 tons of gold to Nepal, stat! Go go go go go!”
> is there any definitive evidence of the actual transport mechanism?
I can tell you from first hand experience that moving high value items isn't as exciting as you'd think.
ULDs are the standardized shipping containers of the sky. You can rent ones that have an inner armored layer and tamper evident seals. They fly as commercial cargo, usually on the flag carrier airline if its a government load. No special rituals or armed guards. Shipments are broken up so the loss of a single aircraft is at most $5 or $10 million.
There are some highly specialized aircraft that transport full loads but they tend to be closer to the supply side, moving bulk gold or diamonds from remote mines for processing.
Cash is the interesting exception (most non-US currency is produced by commercial printers) where a country will send its military to go pick up one big shipment.
Gold is heavy sure, but its $/weight value is still much higher than basically any other cargo - the plane vs ship choice would be even more weighted towards the plane with gold than with most other cargo.
More detail: at current prices gold is $133k USD per kilo - at that price transport costs would be such a tiny fraction of the value of the cargo that it wouldn't make any sense to pinch pennies - you'd want to go with the absolute fastest, safest option.
It does amuse me greatly that major world powers are trading large piles of stones in a place without moving them just like that. That's deeply satisfying.
Buying in Europe creates a demand in Europe, and selling in US creates extra supply in US. So, the market takes care of the transfer from high supply to low supply area.
It's a long story, but Italy's gold is not really Italy's, in the normal sense. Italy lost WWII, and has been a de facto "vassal" of the US since then; the US has several military bases in Italy, and has a very strong influence on anything related to foreign policy, etc. Don't take my word for it, there's not a single link to prove this, but a bit of research should make what I say at least plausible.
Just to give a small hint: the 1998 "strage del Cermis" [0], in which a US aircraft mistakenly cut a cable supporting a cable car and resulted in the killing of 20 people. The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, and his navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were put on trial in the United States and were found not guilty.
Try to imagine something different. An Italian military aircraft flies in the US, and mistakenly kills 20 people. What would have happened to the Italian pilot?
I don't think that counts as exports although they could be selling in the US and buying locally where traders move the gold (then it will be counted as exports).
It’s specifically nonmonetary gold, so that’s a separate issue unless those nations were holding non-reserve gold here.
Although a sibling commenter mentioned that they moved their gold by selling it and rebuying it in Europe. If that gold qualifies as non-reserve gold after sale, and is moved out after sale to (for example) China, then perhaps?
From the article:
> The U.S. government is still reporting that its gold reserves are unchanged, so these exports look to be coming from current mine output and recycling operations.
Not sure if "The U.S governments gold reserves" also includes the ones from other countries though.
That’s an insane amount of gold production. I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces, moving and washing a massive amount of dirt and rocks.
> I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces
I remember watching the first couple seasons of that show. Every time it went to commercial break they'd try to hype up the melodrama with "we gotta do X or we're not gonna reach a thousand ounces!"
My wife and I still quote that to each other out of the blue.
All their properties are played out. They're scraping the bitter dregs from properties that used to produce a massive amount more gold using extremely primitive tech to do so. In some cases, they're just re-running old mining tailings and scraping the ground at the edges of areas they knew were good.
If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.
10 million (troy?) ounces is 311 metric tons. That's plenty of gold, but doesn't seem terribly impressive compared to 160 tons annually? Also, to get that 10 million onces figure, I think you must be including the mid-20th century dredging and hydraulic mining era? That stuff was a far cry from humble prospectors with pans like people might imagine.
No, I am comparing the amount of gold currently pulled from the Klondike. 11,000 ounces of gold from a (looks to me) single large operation pales in comparison to anything of yesteryear. 100 tons/year is quite the haul. Yukon currently is doing more like 3.5 tons/year in total. Nevada is just on a totally different scale.
Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.
Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"
> majority of gold exports are going to Switzerland, almost certainly to the refiners there
Sounds like a refining bottleneck.
Globally, “refining capacity is operating at near-total utilization” [1]. That is particularly true in America, where refiners are “limiting purchases” [2] and “turning away new clients” [3].
Global demand for gold—lead by China—is surging. That, in turn, made gold “the most-developed commodity over 2020-25” with “the highest [new] mine count each year during the period” [4].
Where are those mines opening? In “Australia, Canada and the US,” which “accounted for the largest share of new gold production.”
Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
> Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
> Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
It is common for gold mines to shut down when the price of gold is low, or when technologies used cannot extract a profitable amount. Mines can quickly resume operations when either conditions are met.
> Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine?
OG PoW.
Less facetiously: refined gold is a commodity. Gold ores are various and require expertise to differentiate and value. They're also bulky relative to their gold content.
As someone who is in the gold mining industry, it is really been a… well gold mine for the past decade. Every year I think surely it needs to stop every year profits increase. It’s wild and it has set me and my family up, so I’m incredibly thankful.
Wonder how much actual gold value increase is there vs real inflation. Official inflation values are useless, even basket of products does not give any decent idea about it.
Would have thought advertising and transaction fees myself, but the article says it's usually oil (ok I should have thought of that), "pharmaceuticals" (mkay, seems cheaper to make elsewhere so that's a bit strange), or aircraft and their parts (wut? How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!)
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?
Airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as the engine production capacity of GE and P&W are booked for years to come. Also, unlike Airbus which has multiple final assembly plants across the world, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.
No, Boeing does final assembly in Zhoushan, China for 737s. Airbus does final assembly in EU (Hamburg, Toulouse), US (Alabama), Canada, and China (Tianjin).
Because in-patent pharmaceuticals are a LOT more expensive than out of patent ones their monetary value is far greater than the greater volume of out of patent pharmaceuticals. If you look at where big pharma makes its revenues and their sales relative to generics sellers you can see this. Because of that the cost of making them is not really that important.
As for aircraft, not that many in number, but very expensive things with very expensive parts.
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!
Consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the far east.
If a European buys a product "made by" Apple or nvidia or Nike or Levis - that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, or wherever. America still gets the profits, though.
Anthropic's quarterly revenue is $16 billion. Assuming they are 40% of the ai market, pretend that all the ai market is american, and pretend all tokens are exclusively sold abroad, that would make AI tokens 7.3% of US exports, comparable to aircraft (7.5%). Of course in reality only a small portion of these tokens are american exports.
That really puts it in perspective in a nice way, thank you. These multiples really give a distorted sense of scale even when you know current production is not what is being valued
"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.
...
In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."
When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.
This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.
The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.
There is a reason Pimps, Dealers bought gold chains versus kept cash. Cash and bank accounts could seized while what your arrested with, such as jewelry, is given back to you upon release.
Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.
It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Why couldn't jewelry or other items you are arrested with be seized as well if they can prove (or rather, if you can't disprove) they were bought with ill-gotten gains?
When the USA used to be a law-abiding country, they generally respected people’s personal belongings. It’s hard to prove whether that piece of gold jewelry is not a family heirloom.
> It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.
Exporting gold isn't an improvement in exports by the way. Exporting gold means people are betting your currency is overvalued. Exporting a huge amount of gold means people are betting your currency is incredibly overvalued. Gold being your #1 export means you're screwed, when alongside many other signs that also mean you're screwed.
How much of this is exports being ranked by value, and gold, even a little being worth a lot, quickly becomes the “top” export despite being relatively small in absolute quantity terms?
> Normally, America’s highest value exports are either oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft and their parts. Not now. Starting in October 2025, the value of gold exports has topped all other categories almost every month.
From what I’m reading, the article does rank exports by value.
Relative to quantity, the price of gold might have less to do with why it’s the top of the list, but gold being more valuable in general might still be the main reason it’s at the top.
For example:
June
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $10 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
9 tons of gold exported - $90
By value, oil is the top export.
——-
July
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $9 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
12 tons of gold exported - $108
By value, gold is now the top export.
——-
Even though the price of gold dropped—-the inverse of our current situation to illustrate an extreme—-the general higher price of gold is more relevant to the ranking than its quantity increase.
Was anyone confused by the title and thought we are exporting more gold in volume or weight than other products? It seems obvious that gold must be winning on value.
Sort of, yeah. My reaction was "I know we export huge amounts of food, gold can't be a bigger business than that". But the answer is simply that gold is so vastly overpriced that it exceeds other goods as a result.
No it really isn't. People have transmuted a few hundred milligrams of mercury into gold in the lab with multi-million dollar machines, but that doesn't make it economically viable in the slightest.
If I am reading this correctly, then mercury-198 will receive a neutron, decay to mercury-197, then emit an electron to become gold-197.
Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?
The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.
You wouldn't enrich the 198 isotope, you'd just bombard natural mercury and chemically separate out the gold afterwards.
> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt. The value of a neutron in a nuclear reactor is the opportunity cost of it not hitting a uranium atom to produce fission. 1 mole of neutrons can produce about $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity assuming 40% efficiency. 1 mole of neutrons could alternatively produce 1 mole of gold, which is worth about $26,500. So it's roughly 4 times the market price of gold.
Of course there would be the cost of building and running the reactor and the associated chemical processes to collect the gold, but these cost are probably similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries. Certainly not 12 orders of magnitude more.
While it's not economical to make gold this way, it is economical to make certain medical isotopes this way.
>> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
> Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt.
It is worth checking before accusing someone of making something up...
This appears to come from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l..., which states that the author of a 1980 experiment says "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment." That appears (from skimming sources) to come from a running cost of $5000/hr to produce a few hundred atoms of gold per hour. Modern methods are probably more efficient, but the number didn't come from nowhere.
Addendum: And per https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc, the LHC can turn lead into gold at a rate of 89000 nuclei per second, which is ridiculously far from economically reasonable. The LHC cost $9 billion and uses a lot of power, so I'd say not "similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries" used for gold.
> "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment."
"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."
The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.
"There are multiple foreign governments growing leery of the future loss of purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, where they would prefer a different reserve asset with a better track record. Among all foreign central banks combined, the value of their gold reserves now exceeds their holdings of U.S. Treasury debt."
...
"When you put these factors together, my suspicion is that a high percentage of U.S. gold exports are going to China, though some must first detour through Swiss refineries to convert the gold into kilogram bars of acceptable purity. It is possible that the U.S. government may have acquiesced in this form of payment in return for other political concessions having to do with a number of global uncertainties."
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U.S. bond yields (the interest the U.S. pays on its debt) are increasing because there is less demand for U.S. treasury bonds. Lenders are reluctant to buy U.S. government debt, but the U.S. government needs that money, so it must pay more. This reduces the value of the USD (i.e. increases inflation) and makes the USD a less attractive reserve currency (A good reserve currency holds its value.)*. Gold is just one alternative option, but it is something the U.S. actually has a fair amount of. The U.S. would likely be exporting Swiss francs now if it had a lot of those too.
Why is there less demand for U.S. bonds? The U.S. is accruing a lot of debt with high spending and reduced taxes at the same time AI companies are competing for investment dollars (i.e. loans). There's only so much capital to go around, so interest rates go up.
TL;DR: U.S. spends too much. Taxes too little. AI companies spend too much. Make too little. Investors want more interest to supply cash, so U.S. bond yields go up and USD value goes down. Anyone looking for stable currencies to hold start switching to gold (or others). No grand Chinese conspiracy is necessary.
____________
* The USD is doing well at the current moment, almost inexplicably, but the important thing is what lenders think it will do in the future.
High rates can make the currency more attractive. Not less. Tends to strengthen the USD. So the next conclusion is also false.
But yes, higher yields can be related to demand, but they're not simply a function of demand. They relate to things like inflation expectations, and so the short term rates set by the Fed, and the risk premium. In this case likely the higher rates are not high due to demand but rather due to inflation expectations and the Fed having raised the overnight rate.
Mark my words, we will see war between Europe and the US in our generation’s lifetime. The latest spat between Trump and Zelensky is just the beginning.
To be fair we are in some kind of quiet cold war since nearly all of Europe has to work against and around trumps sanctions and build up independence ASAP which makes orange man even more angry.
Any reasonable wealthy actor who had been up/long on the US prior to 2025 would by now, late 2026, be down/short on them. The reasons are glaring, and accelerating.
Unfortunately the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Rational actors often lose huge amounts of money because the market is irrational, so it's even more rational to just never short anything.
Its 4am here, read the title bleary eyed and saw "God is now the top U.S. export", and thought, "yep that tracks".
How did it come to it that America supports the neo-Soviets, we have flying cars, AI is gradually taking over the world, billionaires own most of the world's wealth, and I just thought a heading like this is normal?
I think the idea is to rise the value of your currency, you rise the demand for your currency, by selling for it something that everybody wants, like gold.
Of course this demand is artificial and you'll run out of hold to sell at some point, but it can hopefully carry you over thd bump.
I still don’t get it. Why does everyone want gold? Its uses are some types of electronics and jewelry. Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.
I really like this conspiracy behind this story/tale!
If you belive in such stories, it may explain why humans are so focused on Gold, and not other precious metals, which are much more rare.
The idea behind the story is just great, isnt it? The idea of whatever space travelling species to come here to mine for gold with human "robots" is really cool. While they could have landed on asteroids which much more Gold-per-ton, they chosed earth because the bio machines available here didnt need any "outer planetary" maintenance or refills?
:-D
edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?
You can see it is true in how well we folow instructions but as soon as we build any kind of hierarchy we act like we are in a tunnel chiseling riches as if there wont be food end of the shift. Ï would design them like that, no uprising, no revolution, no union. Their biggest fear, universal basic income, no more digging.
Half a million years later we are still at it. Innovation is like, rock music, bitcoin mining, minecraft etc
Gold ingot relative rarity + desirability + physical durability means it's a 'physical good' that is likely to retain value above a relative floor...ie it will always be worth something to someone, and virtually every country tracks their own estimate. Gold is a standard element of trade historically as it's a little difficult to steal (easier to defend physically) while being fairly simple to verify and measure.
It’s similar to the valuation of crypto, being based on scarcity and mutual agreement, but without the risk of losing your funds from hacks or bugs, and without the benefit of online transfer. You can put it in a hole in the ground and it will be the exact same in 50 years. It’s shiny and has a history.
Nations like to use it for reserves because it’s stable, historically fit for the purpose of exchange, and well-understood. You can “count” it and use this to settle balances in a way that outsiders can’t easily interfere with.
Almost all “value” is strange and complex. Why is Francium, which is less useful than even gold, worth a theoretical $28 billion per ounce? (Not that you would find any buyers for that quantity.) Why is a Black Lotus card worth $3 million? Why is a dollar worth whatever you can buy for a dollar?
Gold has been valued across almost all cultures for thousands of years. That creates an expectation that it will still be valued.
And, gold is limited (in recoverable quantities) in Earth's crust. Nobody can print a bunch more of it, unlike fiat currency.
Between those two, it's what many people reach for when they fear that the government is going to devalue their currency. They can buy now, with currency that will soon be worth less, and what they buy will be worth something even after the currency becomes worth less.
If you sell something in US, you get paid in US dollars. If you believe dollars soon won't be worth the paper they are printed on, you immediately spend dollars on something that has durable value and take it with you instead.
If you have USD and you think it will value less soon, you change it to gold instead.
If you own gold in the US and think that the USD value will drop very low, you move out of the USD fearing gold retention.
> What makes you think they are are worse financial positions?
Broadly speaking: low growth, high debt, aging populations, aging infrastructure, and very intense economic pressure from countries like the US and China, but also increasing competition with the rising of other countries for global resources.
It’s more of losing trust in the US. If they don’t believe they’ll have access to it when needed or if they believe it might be seized for whatever made up reason, makes sense to move it somewhere they’ll have control over it.
Why would the dropping value of the USD be a factor in selling gold? Doesn't holding gold hedge against exactly that?
I think the real reason is that they're afraid of political instability in the US that may result in 1) an inability to retrieve their gold, or 2) the government confiscating it.
To understand the Gold thesis, I would suggest people to fire up their agents, point it at Luke Gromen's youtube channel, download all the transcripts for last 3-4 years of videos and ask your agent to do a faithful analysis. There is tonne of alpha in that.
The more likely explanation is everyone reckons the AI bubble is about to pop and is suddenly very interested in assets known to hold their value in times of turmoil
The USA no longer "exports" information to Ukraine. This means the USA under agent Krasnov now supports dictator Putin. Gold being exported is another piece of the puzzle.
I think agent Krasnov needs to have all his assets seized and given to The People. That includes the whole corrupt family dynasty. It is fascinating to see how easily the US democracy can be disabled; Yuri explained this in the 1980s already:
That is how we get all those imports cheaper than most countries. Trump just made a deal w Putin for example to import Russia’s diesel … in exchange for USD.
The U.S. government confirmed that its gold reserves remain unchanged, although the definition of "gold," is undergoing modernization.
Following efficiency measures affecting independent oversight in FY2025, the transition is expected to substantially reduce storage costs and security requirements. Under the program, gold bars are exchanged for TrumpBarz™, a cryptocurrency developed through a sovereign–foreign public–private partnership. Its ownership structure is described as "fully transparent," and reportedly associated closely with Mr. Putin, a connection officials dismissed as "purely geographical, financial, and personal.". "This is the biggest heist in history," reported The Downhill, shortly before being informed of violating various national security directives and revocations of its press credentials. The Trump administration declined to comment, while Mr. Musk noted in his interview to us: "Storing digital certificates is much more efficient than storing gold bars. We have reduced the weight of America’s gold reserves by 100% without changing a single number in the spreadsheet."
ton for ton the US top export is CO², and it's largest import is O², or was, if it has slipped then that is the main reason behind the export of ag, as all of it is tied to actual industrial capacity
From Jehovah's witnesses to Scientology, and certain strains of evangelical Christianity. God (and aliens) is still a very export oriented industry in the US.
All the gold? Certainly not. That's just a meme at this point.
For example, Brazilians love to say that the Portuguese stole their gold. Even the highest estimates I could find amount to like 1000 tons of gold which works out to around 135 billion dollars today. Meanwhile, the government robs them of several times that amount every single year: tax revenue is currently around 815 billion dollars.
Somehow I read this as "God is now the top U.S. export", and it made sense at multiple levels.
Of course the Americans would sell God. And their mother. Well some Americans would, and the law would be on their side.
Actually they'd sell their god fearing fellow Americans, their goodness, and make a product out of them. They're the gold of the USA, but they're being destroyed by the straw-man-God propaganda industry.
Money is a virus that has no problem destroying the host. People ritually sell what don't belong to them all the time. Like the air we breathe, the native American lands, state power, or land on the moon. "Don't care" equals great profit. How is this ever going to end well?
I wonder how much of that are foreign central banks moving their gold reserves out of the USA... France, The Netherlands and Germany have been moving gold.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyn8q8gqxo
So not actually productive exports. Just draining the coffers as the criminals in charge loot the commons.
Do they count as export if the owner doesn't change?
If central banks sell their gold in the US and buy new gold abroad (to save themselves physically transporting the gold across the ocean[0]), I suspect that the demand this creates for gold abroad will ultimately cause US gold exports to rise, too.
[0]: See the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134172
Selling it in place neatly sidesteps suspicion about how secure the NY gold really is and if it's all really still there, too.
If this suspicion existed then you'd see a spread between (gold price in the US) and (gold price outside the US)
When Trump screwed with the tariffs we saw exactly that. Arbitrarily messing with tariffs is one of the risks that causes people to think keeping gold in the US is not entirely safe.
Not necessarily. If relations are good, people are willing to look the other way a lot.
Either way, you aren't left holding the bag, you're giving the bag to speculators.
Do they count as export if the owner doesn't change?
I don't know. Does it count as export if it's not moved an inch?
France completely exited New York, the Netherlands roughly halved what they've stored there. That was in 2026. They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe.
Germany moved 111t from New York in 2016, and, afaict, nothing since then. There's still 1236t left.
Italy also keeps over 1000t in New York (no plans for repatriation).
> They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe
This is effectively outsourcing that process to the banks.
Banks can keep it in US and stay happy, they don't necessarily immediately need physical gold. So it's quite efficient, lots of govts do similar stuff.
> 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.
> 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.
Fascinating story
Wow; I would absolutely watch this as a movie. They stole it with a forged waybill for seafood!!!
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.'
---
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!
> After the Great Depression the economic equilibrium the world settled into, with the Bretton Woods treaty
There was a big thing that happened between the Great Depression and Bretton Woods that's pretty critical to why that system emerged.
> most of the non-Soviet aligned world, would agree to base their currency's value on the USD
That seems like wild thing to agree to. Where can I read more about this?
There was this thing where there was a world war and stuff that played a role
> 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!
The hard part is getting countries to agree on one system. Coming up with a good one is easy. You can either do EU style governance where countries vote on policy or go hands off and anchor everything to crypto.
> hard part is getting countries to agree on one system
To put it bluntly, America ended WWII with a global nuclear monopoly and then only industrial base on the planet that hadn't been bombed into smithereens. That put it in a unique position to set the terms of the peace. The only party that came out with any comparable leverage was the USSR on account of its massive army and willingness to maintain a wartime economy that would have been untenable in the democracies of the West. (Absent the USSR, it's again unlikely Bretton-Woods would have emerged–the Soviet threat created an incentive to coöperate.)
More than that, the end of WWII saw American complete its then priority of decolonization. That meant there were lots of newly created countries, not quite peacefully but not at the level of violence that usually accompanies new-country formation (with obvious exceptions, e.g. Partition and Israel/Palestine), that could be wooed with riches and ideology.
Why can't you just have many free floating currencies?
The alternative that was the ICU with an international reserve would punish surplus nations and help deficit nations. A Bretton Woods 2.0 thus would be advantageous to the US while neutralizing much of the advantageous the EU and China have as export based economies.
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.
What's crazy about it is if that ship sunk, as long as nobody knew, it wouldn't matter one bit. Shows just how much of a waste gold mining is.
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.
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.
The linked article title says “flown” but that could be expressive; is there any definitive evidence of the actual transport mechanism?
No; but the volumes are tiny and the cost of freight is not very high. If I were talking about moving gold I would expect it to be flown because the risk of piracy would be too high. It is easier to plan, secure and monitor a flight.
I’ve found a few references for air but none for recent (2022-2026) sea movements yet. This article talks about illicit gold concentrates moving by sea but notes:
“In focussing almost exclusively on gold bars, jewellery, and high-grade recycled gold (over 40% purity), all of which generally travel by air, analysts have tended to disregard the maritime space as a significant arena for illicit gold flows (LBMA, 2022[9]).”
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/illicit-flows-of-gold-c...
The Hong Kong gold vault stores at the airport, not the harbour:
“ Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”
https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-67/gold-vault-at-the...
> “Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”
This makes it sound like emergency delivery of gold is important. “Quick, we need to get 20 tons of gold to Nepal, stat! Go go go go go!”
> is there any definitive evidence of the actual transport mechanism?
I can tell you from first hand experience that moving high value items isn't as exciting as you'd think.
ULDs are the standardized shipping containers of the sky. You can rent ones that have an inner armored layer and tamper evident seals. They fly as commercial cargo, usually on the flag carrier airline if its a government load. No special rituals or armed guards. Shipments are broken up so the loss of a single aircraft is at most $5 or $10 million.
There are some highly specialized aircraft that transport full loads but they tend to be closer to the supply side, moving bulk gold or diamonds from remote mines for processing.
Cash is the interesting exception (most non-US currency is produced by commercial printers) where a country will send its military to go pick up one big shipment.
Gold is heavy sure, but its $/weight value is still much higher than basically any other cargo - the plane vs ship choice would be even more weighted towards the plane with gold than with most other cargo.
More detail: at current prices gold is $133k USD per kilo - at that price transport costs would be such a tiny fraction of the value of the cargo that it wouldn't make any sense to pinch pennies - you'd want to go with the absolute fastest, safest option.
That's why Gold futures have relaunched in London. Keeps spot trading and futures trading in the same timezone
The Yapese people have been doing the same thing [1] for centuries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
It does amuse me greatly that major world powers are trading large piles of stones in a place without moving them just like that. That's deeply satisfying.
> This is effectively outsourcing that process to the banks.
Did the banks export gold then?
The article says the issue is foreign entities buying American gold as a hedge against a volatile, risky dollar as a reserve currency.
Banks or the larger economy?
Buying in Europe creates a demand in Europe, and selling in US creates extra supply in US. So, the market takes care of the transfer from high supply to low supply area.
> They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe.
The Netherlands physically moved 27 tons of gold from the US and Canada (mostly New York) to the Netherlands this year.
Yea it was some transport, some just market sales and re-purchases.
Where did FR, NL, DE rebuy the equivalent or close enough gold that was sold from NYC ?
How many other bank or multiples around the world would be able to support such a sale ?
Gold futures are now trading in London again as well, which is related
Intercontinental Exchange launches trading in gold futures in London - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/e5d7ca...
It's a long story, but Italy's gold is not really Italy's, in the normal sense. Italy lost WWII, and has been a de facto "vassal" of the US since then; the US has several military bases in Italy, and has a very strong influence on anything related to foreign policy, etc. Don't take my word for it, there's not a single link to prove this, but a bit of research should make what I say at least plausible.
Just to give a small hint: the 1998 "strage del Cermis" [0], in which a US aircraft mistakenly cut a cable supporting a cable car and resulted in the killing of 20 people. The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, and his navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were put on trial in the United States and were found not guilty.
Try to imagine something different. An Italian military aircraft flies in the US, and mistakenly kills 20 people. What would have happened to the Italian pilot?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
I don't think that counts as exports although they could be selling in the US and buying locally where traders move the gold (then it will be counted as exports).
It’s specifically nonmonetary gold, so that’s a separate issue unless those nations were holding non-reserve gold here.
Although a sibling commenter mentioned that they moved their gold by selling it and rebuying it in Europe. If that gold qualifies as non-reserve gold after sale, and is moved out after sale to (for example) China, then perhaps?
Probably all of it.
From the article: > The U.S. government is still reporting that its gold reserves are unchanged, so these exports look to be coming from current mine output and recycling operations.
Not sure if "The U.S governments gold reserves" also includes the ones from other countries though.
The answer is no. When talking about gold reserve that means U.S. Treasury-Owned Gold. Of which the volume hasn't changed much for decades.
That's what I thought too but the article says it's mostly fresh mine output (and recycled).
The article is about the export of mined gold. The US produces ~160 tons of gold annually from domestic mining operations.
That’s an insane amount of gold production. I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces, moving and washing a massive amount of dirt and rocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining_in_Nevada
You gotta remember, if those miners weren't basically jumped up amateurs they wouldn't be on a tv show.
Those guys are idiots on purpose to keep people watching.
It's a lot less interesting to watch someone optimize a spreadsheet and every once in awhile look out at a smoothly running operation.
> I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces
I remember watching the first couple seasons of that show. Every time it went to commercial break they'd try to hype up the melodrama with "we gotta do X or we're not gonna reach a thousand ounces!"
My wife and I still quote that to each other out of the blue.
All their properties are played out. They're scraping the bitter dregs from properties that used to produce a massive amount more gold using extremely primitive tech to do so. In some cases, they're just re-running old mining tailings and scraping the ground at the edges of areas they knew were good.
If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.
10 million (troy?) ounces is 311 metric tons. That's plenty of gold, but doesn't seem terribly impressive compared to 160 tons annually? Also, to get that 10 million onces figure, I think you must be including the mid-20th century dredging and hydraulic mining era? That stuff was a far cry from humble prospectors with pans like people might imagine.
No, I am comparing the amount of gold currently pulled from the Klondike. 11,000 ounces of gold from a (looks to me) single large operation pales in comparison to anything of yesteryear. 100 tons/year is quite the haul. Yukon currently is doing more like 3.5 tons/year in total. Nevada is just on a totally different scale.
Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.
Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"
"Insane amount of production" is relative, the entire USofA output is about half the production of the single state I live in.
Admittedly I live in a state roughly 3x the area of Texas.
Hello WA.
Born & bred - pretty nice place, although it's getting a bit crowded these days :/
Wait am I hallucinating? Doesn't WA refer to Washington? Only Alaska is "biggern" Texas....and it's ~3x so. ?!
Western Australia.
Gold repatriation doesn't count as export. So the answer to "how much" is zero.
> majority of gold exports are going to Switzerland, almost certainly to the refiners there
Sounds like a refining bottleneck.
Globally, “refining capacity is operating at near-total utilization” [1]. That is particularly true in America, where refiners are “limiting purchases” [2] and “turning away new clients” [3].
Global demand for gold—lead by China—is surging. That, in turn, made gold “the most-developed commodity over 2020-25” with “the highest [new] mine count each year during the period” [4].
Where are those mines opening? In “Australia, Canada and the US,” which “accounted for the largest share of new gold production.”
[1] https://www.skillings.net/gold-refining-report-global-standa...
[2] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/metal-refiners-t...
[3] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/refining-pipelin...
[4] https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...
Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
Refining takes big machines and a lot of energy. It's pretty much the opposite of free money, you need to invest a lot to unlock the revenue stream.
China likes blocking various minerals such as rare earths to force countries to accept whatever outcome they desire.
I’m guessing those new mines opening are to limit the impact of this sort of situation in the future.
China is only 11.5% of world gold production (from mines).
> Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
> Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
It is common for gold mines to shut down when the price of gold is low, or when technologies used cannot extract a profitable amount. Mines can quickly resume operations when either conditions are met.
If its free money why not leave it in the ground?
Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine? You’re not going to touch either of them!
Just get a note saying you own the gold in whatever cubic foot below ground marked by some coordinate system.
For paper gold you don't even need gold.
> Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine?
OG PoW.
Less facetiously: refined gold is a commodity. Gold ores are various and require expertise to differentiate and value. They're also bulky relative to their gold content.
As someone who is in the gold mining industry, it is really been a… well gold mine for the past decade. Every year I think surely it needs to stop every year profits increase. It’s wild and it has set me and my family up, so I’m incredibly thankful.
Wonder how much actual gold value increase is there vs real inflation. Official inflation values are useless, even basket of products does not give any decent idea about it.
I thought it was tokens
Would have thought advertising and transaction fees myself, but the article says it's usually oil (ok I should have thought of that), "pharmaceuticals" (mkay, seems cheaper to make elsewhere so that's a bit strange), or aircraft and their parts (wut? How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!)
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?
Airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as the engine production capacity of GE and P&W are booked for years to come. Also, unlike Airbus which has multiple final assembly plants across the world, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.
No, Boeing does final assembly in Zhoushan, China for 737s. Airbus does final assembly in EU (Hamburg, Toulouse), US (Alabama), Canada, and China (Tianjin).
Goods versus services. We tend to use the word “exports” to refer to only the former in America, which is anachronistic.
Because in-patent pharmaceuticals are a LOT more expensive than out of patent ones their monetary value is far greater than the greater volume of out of patent pharmaceuticals. If you look at where big pharma makes its revenues and their sales relative to generics sellers you can see this. Because of that the cost of making them is not really that important.
As for aircraft, not that many in number, but very expensive things with very expensive parts.
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!
Consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the far east.
If a European buys a product "made by" Apple or nvidia or Nike or Levis - that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, or wherever. America still gets the profits, though.
A single airliner can be half a billion dollars. That's about 1/4000th of the US's total goods exported in a single item.
Boeing only assembles planes, they dont manufacture the components.
A lot of components are actually imports from other countries, eg Japan manufactures wings.
So? If you import $100 billion dollars of components and you do nothing to them before reselling abroad, you have $100 billion of exports.
I mean, wouldn't that make sense given the market caps?
So many trillion-dollar valued AI-focused companies.
It would make sense if the AI companies were rationally valued, yes. But they're not, so it's not.
I think those count as services. Gold is the most-exported good.
Title doesn't mention good specifically.
How are service exports counted? All together? Or not considered exports?
> Title doesn't mention good specifically
Literally the link in the first paragraph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IEAXGG.
It’s conventional, in American English, for exports unadorned to mean just goods. It’s anachronistic. But it isn’t wrong.
Anthropic's quarterly revenue is $16 billion. Assuming they are 40% of the ai market, pretend that all the ai market is american, and pretend all tokens are exclusively sold abroad, that would make AI tokens 7.3% of US exports, comparable to aircraft (7.5%). Of course in reality only a small portion of these tokens are american exports.
That really puts it in perspective in a nice way, thank you. These multiples really give a distorted sense of scale even when you know current production is not what is being valued
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_Mine_(South_Dakota)
"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.
...
In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."
When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
> Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
Holy fucking badass move.
The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.
This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.
The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.
That’s not just a US boomer thing, you’ll see the same in many Arabic countries for example, across generations.
I have 30 lbs of gold plated PCB fingers that I have saved over the years. It might be time to figure out how to recycle and sell.
Here is one way to do it: https://youtu.be/r3-tmMg9dTs?is=i7M081-ypJ-pn16t
There is a reason Pimps, Dealers bought gold chains versus kept cash. Cash and bank accounts could seized while what your arrested with, such as jewelry, is given back to you upon release.
Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.
It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Why couldn't jewelry or other items you are arrested with be seized as well if they can prove (or rather, if you can't disprove) they were bought with ill-gotten gains?
When the USA used to be a law-abiding country, they generally respected people’s personal belongings. It’s hard to prove whether that piece of gold jewelry is not a family heirloom.
> It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.
This is fascinating. Do you have any good reads on this topic?
Fort Knox is for tourists
Speaks volumes of the results the policies to make the US a manufacturing and exporting country are getting.
Maybe tariffing everyone isn't really the path to prosperity?
For people who don't understand second and higher consequences, it sounds like a good one
Exporting gold isn't an improvement in exports by the way. Exporting gold means people are betting your currency is overvalued. Exporting a huge amount of gold means people are betting your currency is incredibly overvalued. Gold being your #1 export means you're screwed, when alongside many other signs that also mean you're screwed.
How much of this is exports being ranked by value, and gold, even a little being worth a lot, quickly becomes the “top” export despite being relatively small in absolute quantity terms?
From the article:
>That’s not just because the price of gold reached record high prices. In February 2026, the tons of gold exported may have set an all-time record.
From what I’m reading, the article does rank exports by value.
Relative to quantity, the price of gold might have less to do with why it’s the top of the list, but gold being more valuable in general might still be the main reason it’s at the top.
For example:
June
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $10 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
9 tons of gold exported - $90
By value, oil is the top export.
——-
July
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $9 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
12 tons of gold exported - $108
By value, gold is now the top export.
——-
Even though the price of gold dropped—-the inverse of our current situation to illustrate an extreme—-the general higher price of gold is more relevant to the ranking than its quantity increase.
I feel like pharmaceuticals and aircraft are quite expensive by mass
That's not an answer to the question. Yes the gold is setting a tonnage record for gold but value is the only reason it's high up on the list.
Was anyone confused by the title and thought we are exporting more gold in volume or weight than other products? It seems obvious that gold must be winning on value.
Sort of, yeah. My reaction was "I know we export huge amounts of food, gold can't be a bigger business than that". But the answer is simply that gold is so vastly overpriced that it exceeds other goods as a result.
So it's in fact a bigger business. Why do Americans always make up weird comparison methods when it looks bad for them?
Exports are typically ranked in dollars, not in kilograms. Do we think about the weight of GPUs a country exports or their value?
What else would it be ranked on other than value? How else would you compare different types of items?
With the proper facilities, isn’t it already economical to transmute mercury to gold via neutron bombardment?
No it really isn't. People have transmuted a few hundred milligrams of mercury into gold in the lab with multi-million dollar machines, but that doesn't make it economically viable in the slightest.
If I am reading this correctly, then mercury-198 will receive a neutron, decay to mercury-197, then emit an electron to become gold-197.
Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?
The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
"...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
The above reaction is at the end of the section.
You wouldn't enrich the 198 isotope, you'd just bombard natural mercury and chemically separate out the gold afterwards.
> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt. The value of a neutron in a nuclear reactor is the opportunity cost of it not hitting a uranium atom to produce fission. 1 mole of neutrons can produce about $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity assuming 40% efficiency. 1 mole of neutrons could alternatively produce 1 mole of gold, which is worth about $26,500. So it's roughly 4 times the market price of gold.
Of course there would be the cost of building and running the reactor and the associated chemical processes to collect the gold, but these cost are probably similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries. Certainly not 12 orders of magnitude more.
While it's not economical to make gold this way, it is economical to make certain medical isotopes this way.
>> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
> Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt.
It is worth checking before accusing someone of making something up...
This appears to come from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l..., which states that the author of a 1980 experiment says "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment." That appears (from skimming sources) to come from a running cost of $5000/hr to produce a few hundred atoms of gold per hour. Modern methods are probably more efficient, but the number didn't come from nowhere.
Addendum: And per https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc, the LHC can turn lead into gold at a rate of 89000 nuclei per second, which is ridiculously far from economically reasonable. The LHC cost $9 billion and uses a lot of power, so I'd say not "similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries" used for gold.
> "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment."
"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."
The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.
This is disastrous. The president may need to take emergency measures to suspend the convertibility of the dollar into gold.
its just unwinding from the tariff holdings
200 comments and this is the only correct one :)
"There are multiple foreign governments growing leery of the future loss of purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, where they would prefer a different reserve asset with a better track record. Among all foreign central banks combined, the value of their gold reserves now exceeds their holdings of U.S. Treasury debt."
...
"When you put these factors together, my suspicion is that a high percentage of U.S. gold exports are going to China, though some must first detour through Swiss refineries to convert the gold into kilogram bars of acceptable purity. It is possible that the U.S. government may have acquiesced in this form of payment in return for other political concessions having to do with a number of global uncertainties."
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U.S. bond yields (the interest the U.S. pays on its debt) are increasing because there is less demand for U.S. treasury bonds. Lenders are reluctant to buy U.S. government debt, but the U.S. government needs that money, so it must pay more. This reduces the value of the USD (i.e. increases inflation) and makes the USD a less attractive reserve currency (A good reserve currency holds its value.)*. Gold is just one alternative option, but it is something the U.S. actually has a fair amount of. The U.S. would likely be exporting Swiss francs now if it had a lot of those too.
Why is there less demand for U.S. bonds? The U.S. is accruing a lot of debt with high spending and reduced taxes at the same time AI companies are competing for investment dollars (i.e. loans). There's only so much capital to go around, so interest rates go up.
TL;DR: U.S. spends too much. Taxes too little. AI companies spend too much. Make too little. Investors want more interest to supply cash, so U.S. bond yields go up and USD value goes down. Anyone looking for stable currencies to hold start switching to gold (or others). No grand Chinese conspiracy is necessary.
____________
* The USD is doing well at the current moment, almost inexplicably, but the important thing is what lenders think it will do in the future.
High rates can make the currency more attractive. Not less. Tends to strengthen the USD. So the next conclusion is also false.
But yes, higher yields can be related to demand, but they're not simply a function of demand. They relate to things like inflation expectations, and so the short term rates set by the Fed, and the risk premium. In this case likely the higher rates are not high due to demand but rather due to inflation expectations and the Fed having raised the overnight rate.
Bid to cover can be one estimate of demand and I'm not really seeing anything particularly exciting going on here: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/30431/us-10y-bid-to-cover-ra...
Mark my words, we will see war between Europe and the US in our generation’s lifetime. The latest spat between Trump and Zelensky is just the beginning.
To be fair we are in some kind of quiet cold war since nearly all of Europe has to work against and around trumps sanctions and build up independence ASAP which makes orange man even more angry.
Then there's the constant "war" happening in cybersec. So many of the really big incidents are state-sponsored!
Any reasonable wealthy actor who had been up/long on the US prior to 2025 would by now, late 2026, be down/short on them. The reasons are glaring, and accelerating.
Unfortunately the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Rational actors often lose huge amounts of money because the market is irrational, so it's even more rational to just never short anything.
Its 4am here, read the title bleary eyed and saw "God is now the top U.S. export", and thought, "yep that tracks".
How did it come to it that America supports the neo-Soviets, we have flying cars, AI is gradually taking over the world, billionaires own most of the world's wealth, and I just thought a heading like this is normal?
If you think that USD value will drop sharply, it's a logical thing to do.
I don't quite follow. Countries hold gold to protect their own currency from devaluation, not bc they expected it to become stronger against a dollar.
How does holding gold protect from devaluation? No one has currency backed by gold any more.
> How does holding gold protect from devaluation?
I think the idea is to rise the value of your currency, you rise the demand for your currency, by selling for it something that everybody wants, like gold.
Of course this demand is artificial and you'll run out of hold to sell at some point, but it can hopefully carry you over thd bump.
I still don’t get it. Why does everyone want gold? Its uses are some types of electronics and jewelry. Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.
Sincere question.
To trade with Anunnaki. They need it to repair Nibiru's failing atmosphere.
LOL
Massivly surprised to see a link to this storyline/paradigm here on HN, great!
Cheers! :-))
You'd be surprised what livered onions go for on Zeta Reticula.
I really like this conspiracy behind this story/tale!
If you belive in such stories, it may explain why humans are so focused on Gold, and not other precious metals, which are much more rare.
The idea behind the story is just great, isnt it? The idea of whatever space travelling species to come here to mine for gold with human "robots" is really cool. While they could have landed on asteroids which much more Gold-per-ton, they chosed earth because the bio machines available here didnt need any "outer planetary" maintenance or refills?
:-D
edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?
You can see it is true in how well we folow instructions but as soon as we build any kind of hierarchy we act like we are in a tunnel chiseling riches as if there wont be food end of the shift. Ï would design them like that, no uprising, no revolution, no union. Their biggest fear, universal basic income, no more digging.
Half a million years later we are still at it. Innovation is like, rock music, bitcoin mining, minecraft etc
Pretty deep
> edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?
Now I understand why humans are cattle, not pets. The overlords designed it right.
Keep digging!
> Why does everyone want gold?
Because you sell it cheap.
> Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.
Exactly.
It has value because it won't spoil and you can sell it later gor the same or more because it's scarce.
The value of Gold isn't linked to any currency. Money is just paper (or a number) and can be de-valuated. Gold doesn't.
Gold ingot relative rarity + desirability + physical durability means it's a 'physical good' that is likely to retain value above a relative floor...ie it will always be worth something to someone, and virtually every country tracks their own estimate. Gold is a standard element of trade historically as it's a little difficult to steal (easier to defend physically) while being fairly simple to verify and measure.
It’s similar to the valuation of crypto, being based on scarcity and mutual agreement, but without the risk of losing your funds from hacks or bugs, and without the benefit of online transfer. You can put it in a hole in the ground and it will be the exact same in 50 years. It’s shiny and has a history.
Nations like to use it for reserves because it’s stable, historically fit for the purpose of exchange, and well-understood. You can “count” it and use this to settle balances in a way that outsiders can’t easily interfere with.
Almost all “value” is strange and complex. Why is Francium, which is less useful than even gold, worth a theoretical $28 billion per ounce? (Not that you would find any buyers for that quantity.) Why is a Black Lotus card worth $3 million? Why is a dollar worth whatever you can buy for a dollar?
Why is a bitcoin worth anything?
Why is anything worth anything?
The short but final answer: because other people want it.
It’s scarce
Gold has been valued across almost all cultures for thousands of years. That creates an expectation that it will still be valued.
And, gold is limited (in recoverable quantities) in Earth's crust. Nobody can print a bunch more of it, unlike fiat currency.
Between those two, it's what many people reach for when they fear that the government is going to devalue their currency. They can buy now, with currency that will soon be worth less, and what they buy will be worth something even after the currency becomes worth less.
I don't think holding gold does much, but in theory, a central bank could prop up its currency by selling the gold. It's like selling any other asset.
If you sell something in US, you get paid in US dollars. If you believe dollars soon won't be worth the paper they are printed on, you immediately spend dollars on something that has durable value and take it with you instead.
If you have USD and you think it will value less soon, you change it to gold instead. If you own gold in the US and think that the USD value will drop very low, you move out of the USD fearing gold retention.
But there isn’t a good reason to think that since countries such as Italy, UK, France, and others are in much worse financial positions.
A lot of this stuff is just business as usual, and then tabloids like to turn it into some doom and gloom nonsense.
From [1], in 2025 government net debt / GDP for the countries mentioned was:
Germany 47.2 USA 96.7 France 108.8 Italy 127.7
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
I didn’t mention Germany, not that it’s bad to include it. But unlike the others the US has a growing economy.
Ooops, sorry. Let's throw in the UK too then, and do real GDP growth too (latest data from [2]):
Germany 47.2; 1.3
UK 93.8; 1.3
USA 96.7; 2.3
France 108.8; 0.4
Italy 127.7; 0.8
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
Thanks for posting and I do mean it. I hope my post didn’t come across snarky I really don’t mind the inclusion of Germany there. :)
Growing in nominal or real terms? Which numbers did you use for inflation adjustment, because the official ones are very questionable?
> Growing in nominal or real terms?
Either. You can check major sources (WSJ, Financial Times, &c.)
> because the official ones are very questionable?
I trust the institution regardless of what party is in power.
What makes you think they are are worse financial positions? Propaganda around here makes it sound the US is very close to collapsing
> What makes you think they are are worse financial positions?
Broadly speaking: low growth, high debt, aging populations, aging infrastructure, and very intense economic pressure from countries like the US and China, but also increasing competition with the rising of other countries for global resources.
It’s more of losing trust in the US. If they don’t believe they’ll have access to it when needed or if they believe it might be seized for whatever made up reason, makes sense to move it somewhere they’ll have control over it.
Probably not. This is non-monetary gold mostly going off to refiners. Not bullion.
They think the Trump administration will confiscate it.
Whatever would give them that idea…
It wasn't that long ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102?wprov=sfl...
Why would the dropping value of the USD be a factor in selling gold? Doesn't holding gold hedge against exactly that?
I think the real reason is that they're afraid of political instability in the US that may result in 1) an inability to retrieve their gold, or 2) the government confiscating it.
To understand the Gold thesis, I would suggest people to fire up their agents, point it at Luke Gromen's youtube channel, download all the transcripts for last 3-4 years of videos and ask your agent to do a faithful analysis. There is tonne of alpha in that.
It's other countries selling their USD to buy gold, not the US itself.
It's more like if you think Trump is likely to say, actually that's my gold.
Other countries moving their gold out of the US, LOL
i liked it when it was pork
If sanctions become effective, the next best option for terrorists is gold. Logically the next step for them.
Tracking gold shipment is the next logical step for law enforcement.
So it's probably a short lived bubble, for anyone weighing investments.
who are you referring to by the word "terrorists"?
Judging by stock prices, I think the implicit expectation is that the US will soon start exporting a lot of AI.
The more likely explanation is everyone reckons the AI bubble is about to pop and is suddenly very interested in assets known to hold their value in times of turmoil
The USA no longer "exports" information to Ukraine. This means the USA under agent Krasnov now supports dictator Putin. Gold being exported is another piece of the puzzle.
I think agent Krasnov needs to have all his assets seized and given to The People. That includes the whole corrupt family dynasty. It is fascinating to see how easily the US democracy can be disabled; Yuri explained this in the 1980s already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
may 2026.
No, the top US export is still USD.
That is how we get all those imports cheaper than most countries. Trump just made a deal w Putin for example to import Russia’s diesel … in exchange for USD.
The amount of diesel Russia will be exporting to world markets is barely a fraction of a days worth, 100s of thousands when the world needs 20M a day.
Its a dumb stunt for people who have no idea of the actual numbers.
That would be a very convenient way to fix the trade balance that Trump is so obsessed about...
The U.S. government confirmed that its gold reserves remain unchanged, although the definition of "gold," is undergoing modernization.
Following efficiency measures affecting independent oversight in FY2025, the transition is expected to substantially reduce storage costs and security requirements. Under the program, gold bars are exchanged for TrumpBarz™, a cryptocurrency developed through a sovereign–foreign public–private partnership. Its ownership structure is described as "fully transparent," and reportedly associated closely with Mr. Putin, a connection officials dismissed as "purely geographical, financial, and personal.". "This is the biggest heist in history," reported The Downhill, shortly before being informed of violating various national security directives and revocations of its press credentials. The Trump administration declined to comment, while Mr. Musk noted in his interview to us: "Storing digital certificates is much more efficient than storing gold bars. We have reduced the weight of America’s gold reserves by 100% without changing a single number in the spreadsheet."
/s
ton for ton the US top export is CO², and it's largest import is O², or was, if it has slipped then that is the main reason behind the export of ag, as all of it is tied to actual industrial capacity
Straight up read God.
God was exported to distant places like China, Japan, India by the church. Following is a great movie on that topic.
Silence - The Deconstruction of Faith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj7SGe7FcYE
From Jehovah's witnesses to Scientology, and certain strains of evangelical Christianity. God (and aliens) is still a very export oriented industry in the US.
All the gold was stolen from Africa or South America by the Europeans no?
The biggest gold mines by far are in the US, Russia, and other former Soviet republics.
No, it is much more diverse than that. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_mineral_...
All the gold? Certainly not. That's just a meme at this point.
For example, Brazilians love to say that the Portuguese stole their gold. Even the highest estimates I could find amount to like 1000 tons of gold which works out to around 135 billion dollars today. Meanwhile, the government robs them of several times that amount every single year: tax revenue is currently around 815 billion dollars.
Swiss here. People literally sold it to us and bring it here for safety. No stealing as far as I know.
Gold is tiny compared to oil and other energy exports. I would more watch for drop in energy exports, and how US is screwing its partners right now!
Somehow I read this as "God is now the top U.S. export", and it made sense at multiple levels.
Of course the Americans would sell God. And their mother. Well some Americans would, and the law would be on their side.
Actually they'd sell their god fearing fellow Americans, their goodness, and make a product out of them. They're the gold of the USA, but they're being destroyed by the straw-man-God propaganda industry.
Money is a virus that has no problem destroying the host. People ritually sell what don't belong to them all the time. Like the air we breathe, the native American lands, state power, or land on the moon. "Don't care" equals great profit. How is this ever going to end well?
US currency says "In God We Trust", not "In Gold We Trust".
And if America trusted god - they wouldnt need weapons because we all know prayer works.
Just cast Protect From Missiles