No, they could sell the gold in the US to purchase gold that’s already physically closer for a slight premium. Possibly that ends up being cheaper than actual transport.
In December there was a large movement of physical gold from London to New York as banks closed their EFP arbs. This was enough to put a lot of pressure on the market.
I imagine if Germany did that with their reserves a similar effect would come about.
What else would be meaningful in this context? Are sovereign countries currently restricted in trading gold backed securities when stored abroad? I don't think so.
Not necessarily. It’s fair to wager that the gold they speak of is gold securities and not literal gold bars because if they try to collect gold bars they’re going to be sad.
Considering the US only has 8,000 tonnes of gold total, this is going to be interesting. I don’t think their gold is just sitting in a closet in manhattan.
> As of 2024, the vault housed approximately 507,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of 6,331 metric tons. The vault is able to support this weight because it rests on the bedrock of Manhattan Island, 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level.
> Following the verification process, the gold is moved to one of the vault’s 122 compartments, where each compartment contains gold held by a single account holder (meaning that gold is not commingled between account holders).
Thanks for the link! I wonder how this works. Is there just no practical impact of the "book value" being so far off the market price? Surely any exchange is done at the prevailing rates.
> The market value of a gold bar depends on its weight, purity level, and the prevailing market price for gold. Rather than market pricing which fluctuates daily, the New York Fed uses the United States official book value of $42.2222 per troy ounce for gold holdings.
I tell you, I was an HP-UX sysadmin into the late '90s and the regional telco used a LOT of HP-UX.
Around '95 I spent a solid year setting up a pair of T520s worth about a million bucks, to be a HA cluster responsible for part of the billing process, which was being ported to Unix from the IBM mainframe by a team of 20 (mostly inept, a few smart cookies) programmers. Only to be cancelled at literally the last possible moment to keep on the mainframe. I highly suspect that it was all a ploy to get better mainframe upgrade terms.
Not on April 1st, but at one point management spent the last of their budget for the year on upgrading this pair of T520s from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. BUT they didn't buy extra drives to grow swap, and we were already WAY into the deployment so we couldn't just go repartitioning. HP-UX required all memory to be backed by swap to be able to use it, so the extra 2GB of RAM went entirely unused.
My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel). She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so I have a soft spot for it.
I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.
QModem allowed me to explore the wonderful world of BBSs before the Internet was a thing. Having access to BBSs gave me a leg up when I got to University and got access to the Internet. BBSs are what got me seriously interested in computers and helped me launch a career in software development.
Your Dad's legacy will be writing the software that opened doors for many of us when computers used to be a walled garden and talking to another person on a computer was still a foreign concept for the general population. Condolences on the loss of of your father but hopefully you can take comfort in the fact his legacy made the world a better place for PC users.
I had the opposite experience. I actually left the industry and then suffered a workplace injury in the new job(PTSD). Trust me when I say this, PTSD really messes you up. One of the biggest injuries was my brain's ability to logically reason.
So with lots of free time due to medical leave I got got back into coding. Picking it up after having not done it for some time was not too bad. After a while I was ready to start learning new stuff. As I got better at coding a lot of my PTSD symptoms started to subside. I had an easier time organizing my thoughts.
Eventually my PTSD symptoms subsided and I knew enough code to get a job writing code. So while yes, I have burned out on coding it was also the old friend that dug me out of the hole.
Spent hours back in the day getting my ass kicked playing this with my grandfather. It quite often got used as a chance to get some grandfatherly advice. The one lesson he taught me and has stuck with me:
"If you can't win. Make it hard for the other guy to win."
