Monday, January 19, 2015

Germany repatriated 120 metric tons of gold to the Fatherland in 2014

From the story here:

"The Bundesbank successfully continued and further stepped up its transfers of gold," the central bank said in a statement. "In 2014, 120 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt from storage locations abroad: 35 tonnes from Paris and 85 tonnes from New York. Germany's gold reserves are the second-biggest in the world after those of the United States and totalled 3,384.2 tonnes this month, according to the latest data compiled by the World Gold Council. ... Under the Bundesbank's new gold storage plan in 2013, it decided to bring back 674 tonnes from abroad by 2020 and store half of its gold in its own vaults. ... Since the transfers began in 2013, the Bundesbank said it has relocated a total of 157 tonnes of gold to Frankfurt -- 67 tonnes from Paris and 90 tonnes from New York.

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If I'm doing the math right, that means that in 2013 New York coughed up just 5 metric tons of Germany's gold to Germany, and Paris 32 metric tons.

If the plan is to repatriate 674 metric tons by 2020, the 157 repatriated so far means there are just 517 to go, or about 86.1 metric tons per year through 2020, to put half of Germany's gold back in Germany.

The story line not included above includes the narrative that it was unsafe to let Germany store its own gold in its homeland during the Cold War. But there were already 1,018.1 metric tons stored in Germany all those years, not quite a third of its holdings. Seems like a pretty big target to me.

An interesting assessment of the risks, wouldn't you say? Or was something else at work here? Versailles, and all that.