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.
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.
Only fools like the management of Apple, Microsoft, and Google would lend money to the United States government. Government bonds have fallen 80% relative to gold in the past few years.
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.
High-end enterprise Xeon processors are worth more by weight than gold but Nvidia H200 processors are worth less. The Intel chips are worth 3-6x the Nvidia chips.
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?
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"
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Only fools like the management of Apple, Microsoft, and Google would lend money to the United States government. Government bonds have fallen 80% relative to gold in the past few years.
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.
Gold is a valuable metal with many uses, and it can't be printed. You can make diamonds but not gold.
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.
High-end enterprise Xeon processors are worth more by weight than gold but Nvidia H200 processors are worth less. The Intel chips are worth 3-6x the Nvidia chips.
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
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.
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?
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?
That's what I thought too but the article says it's mostly fresh mine output (and recycled).
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.
Gold repatriation doesn't count as export. So the answer to "how much" is zero.
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).
Probably all of it.
So not actually productive exports. Just draining the coffers as the criminals in charge loot the commons.