Is China a vassal state?
At the Federal Reserve Bank in NYC the gold bars are segregated into individual cages by country (although they aren’t labeled like they were in Die Hard 3) so it’s pretty easy for a foreign representative to verify that the sending country’s gold is all present without said representative being able to observe how much gold other countries are keeping there.
So, in other words, the fed could just have a portion of the total deposits and shuffle it around to each cage as necessary to please individual country audits!
Unlikely, but could.
I’m not sure if there are other safeguards in place to prevent this or not. Obviously, there is some level of trust involved, as well as the knowledge on both sides that the U.S. benefits from this trust and that it would be contrary to our interests to betray it.
No. From the website of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, “All bars brought into the vault for deposit are carefully weighed, and the refiner and fineness (purity) markings on the bars are inspected to ensure they agree with the depositor instructions and recorded in the New York Fed’s records. This step is vital because the New York Fed returns the exact bars deposited by the account holder upon withdrawal—gold deposits are not considered fungible.” The site also says, “Much of the gold in the vault arrived during and after World War II as many countries wanted to store their gold reserves in a safe location.”
Periodic Videos visits the Bank of England’s bullion vault.
Hmmm, Napoleon’s estate? He’d have been on St Helena the last time the brick was moved…
No.
Some fast googling gives as these two articles:
Should China repatriate its 600 tons of gold reserves in U.S.?
http://english.sina.com/business/2012/1204/534146.html
How Much Gold Does China Really Have?…
The conclusion is that China’s gold in USA is less than 1/10 of China’s reserves.
It would be interesting to know who shipped that gold to USA.
Was it the Communist goverments, or the “Nationalists” (or whatever they were called back then)?
They’re storing gold in foreign banks. You said that makes them a vassal state.
Actually, the vast majority of the Bundesbank’s gold in New York has never been inside Germany. The German gold reserves were acquired during the days of the Bretton Woods monetary system, when most countries’ currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was pegged to gold. In these days, Germany’s persistent current account surplus allowed the Bundesbank to accumulate foreign reserves, and this took place in gold. No actual shipment took place, however; it was simply that other countries’ reserves, stored at the New York Fed, were transferred via book entry from the previous owner to the Bundesbank without physically moving them. Since there was never a need for the bars to be shipped to Germany (what would Germany do with them there?), they simply stayed in New York and haven’t left the Fed vault (which I have had the pleasure of visiting, it’s very much a Goldfinger sort of experience) in decades.