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The article title says china is hoarding the worlds gold, yet the us owns the most by a very large margin…
Not to mention the large amounts of other countries gold that we hold and decide to keep permanently whenever a country makes us upset. We’ve stolen so many countries reserves, after FORCING many of them to store their reserves in the US.
So? We don’t use it for money anymore.
But when money fails (hyperinflation, sanctions, digital collapse, bank failures, violent revolution, etc.), countries who already have gold reserves will be the only ones with anything of value.
Beyond that, just by virtue of the fear of any of those events or general international turmoil rising, the value of gold rises, too, as one of very few stores of wealth that can survive any such event. Investing in gold is a great low-risk move for guaranteed returns on huge reserves.
Edit: I don’t know why people are downvoting this lol. Talk to literally anyone in finance.
Money is like fairies. If you stop believing in it, it stops existing.
Newsweek is hoarding the world’s stupid.
False - there’s an unlimited supply of stupid.
Can you imagine a reality where “stupid” was a finite resource? People would literally fight over “stupid” in order to be the stupidest on Earth. Which by our standards is pretty stupid by itself, regardless how it is approached.
Doesn’t the US literally have the vast majority of the world’s original gold reserves from the bretton woods agreement before Nixon abolished the gold standard?
possession /= property. During Bretton-woods everyone deposited their gold in the US.
The US own around 8.1k tonnes, EU member states 11.7k, Switzerland another 1000.
Germany has the 2nd largest reserves by country (after the US), 3300 tons, and has been bringing gold physically home, completely emptying Paris’ vault, moving 500t from New York to Frankfurt, London stayed about stable.
You now might be asking yourself “how the fuck do they transport 500t gold across the Atlantic” and the answer is: Nobody knows. The Bundesbank isn’t saying a thing short of that the gold went to Switzerland to be analysed and re-melted. It’s not much volume-wise though, about 9m3. My best bet is submarine to Germany’s north coast, then an inconspicuous train to Switzerland (it’s not like German subs can’t operate in shallow water but the Rhine, nope).
Could have also used a transport barge, they’re apparently the most efficient means of shipping materials over long distances, granted this is primarily over river conditions.
Ok that was always allowed!
Apparently not if you’re Libya
I’d like you to tell me a better way for Xi to swim around in a giant moneybin like Scrooge McDuck.
Sure. And Trump gave his presidential salary to charity.
When you are a dictator, you don’t need a salary.
On the books
From the article:
Its gold reserves are estimated to be 2,113 tonnes as of July—the fifth largest behind the Federal Reserve’s 8,133
But I need that gold!
China is also the land of dragons. Coincidence?
Does gold still have the same value it used to? When it was first used people put value on “oooh, shiny rock, it must be precious”, but now is it really that valuable? It sounds like they’re hoarding it because they think it’s useful as a currency, but if things got bad would other countries care about it?
Gold is agreed upon as a store of value. There’s always someone willing to buy it. You’re right that its intrinsic value as a material is lower than the actual price but people’s belief in gold is the same as their belief in a fiat currency.
The difference is that gold is a physical asset, so that no matter what the rate of inflation or the fluctuation of the market price if you have a tonne of gold you will always have that tonne.
Also it is not administered by a central bank with a political agenda.
Lastly gold is rare and finite. Eventually there will be no more gold to be mined.
I think the fact that it’s very chemically stable is likely a factor as well so it can be stored for effectively an infinite amount of time & it won’t degrade/react, it’ll still be gold.
Yeah, it’s more than just “shiny good”
@lanigerous @Spendrill It’s also very conductive. It’s not an accident that gold is used in high-quality electronic contacts like cable ends or card edges.
Very good point.
The price of gold fluctuates though. And it could potentially devalue significantly if a new source is discovered or a new method of mining or extracting it (such as filtering it from seawater) is developed.
So yes, if you have a tonne of gold, you will always have that tonne, but it could lose, say, 20% of its value quickly.
It could indeed and has done so in the past. But the thing about it is that the price always recovers because people believe it will always be valuable. It’s the belief that endures and because people will always pay for what they believe to be valuable the value of gold as a currency endures. Also the retail value of gold remains high as the single largest application is jewellery Source page So there’s a conflation of the value of the labour that goes into making jewellery, adding value and in some cases the value of the piece will take that gold permanently out of circulation for use as currency e.g. the Mask of Agamemnon
Until we can successfully mine asteroids, and then all precious metals will have nigh infinite supplies. I suspect we’re not too many decades away from that.
Oh, look! An asteroid made almost entirely out of gold! T’would be a shame if someone were to mine it…
Just back a transit van up to it, hack a lump off with a pneumatic drill, sling it in the back, we’ll be back by teatime.
About 10% of gold usage is in technology. This has been steady for many years. Jewelry and Investments can trade off. But yeah, basically its just mostly values because its a rare shiny rock.
It tends to go up in value during chaotic times as people use it to insulate their savings from the economy when they are expecting regular currencies or economies to crash.
Its value has kept increasing over time.
And it will likely keep doing so, as while in the past gold reserves only dropped when gold was lost (like ye old Spanish ship going down in the Ocean) against its natural increase of continued mining, these days, gold is also used in quite a lot of applications where it becomes impractical to recover after being discarded.
And this removal of gold reserves will only keep increasing with the increase of its uses in technology.
So, yeah, its value is almost assured to stay very solid and monopolizing the worlds gold also gives you a degree of control over technology markets.
Markets where the west has typically kept China behind the curve.
It gives them leverage, economical and technological.
If things got bad they’d have the advantage as gold is a much more trustworthy investment than unbacked currencies
Yup there’s a reason why the US holding them in Fort Knox
Newsweek
I mean, fuck off
The world’s gold you say? Seems to me that once someone owns it the gold is no longer the property of “the world.”
