Germany Is Taking Back Gold from the United States

The German Central Bank’s (Bundesbank) member of the board Carl-Ludwig Thiele presents gold bars during a press conference at the headquarters of the German Central Bank (Bundesbank) in Frankfurt, Germany on February 9, 2017. (Abdulselam Durdak/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

 

… and it’s ahead of schedule.

…

The German Central Bank announced on Jan. 16, 2013, that it would relocate the gold from New York to Frankfurt. This decision was made after the U.S. Federal Reserve refused to submit to an audit of German gold held in U.S. vaults. The Germans initially estimated it would take seven years to repatriate the gold, but in yesterday’s announcement, they revealed that they had completed the task four years ahead of schedule.

Where Is Germany’s Gold?

Almost half of Germany’s gold is stored in vaults under the streets of Manhattan. Or is it?

Peter Boehringer hates the word “conspiracy.” It implies something crazy, and if you spend even a little time with the 45-year-old German, it becomes clear he’s driven by a desire for order. On a recent morning in Munich, he’s dressed in a cobalt blue shirt that matches his blue tie and blue eyes. His black hair is cropped close above his receded hairline. In his gray Volkswagen minivan, the cup holder contains two identical water bottles, each filled to the same level. At the end of a daylong interview, for which Boehringer has arranged an hour-by-hour itinerary, he sends a follow-up e-mail with a numbered summation of points he’s made. No. 2 says that the crusade he’s been waging for the last three years is simply about transparency. “Questions,” he writes, “by definition cannot be ‘conspiracy theories.’ ”

Boehringer is a gold bug, a member of the impassioned tribe of investors and academics who distrust central banks and paper money, unless the governments that print it will exchange the cash for gold or silver from their vaults. He has an asset management firm that invests his own money and that of clients in gold, silver, and mining stocks, and he’s a founder of the nonprofit German Precious Metal Society, which educates the public about “the craziness of unbacked monetary systems,” he says. In short, Boehringer is worried that the global economy is built on a fiction of currencies that aren’t backed by precious metals. Which is why he set out to make sure the gold that Germany and other nations say they have actually exists.

It Begins: Bundesbank To Commence Repatriating Gold From New York Fed

In what could be a watershed moment for the price, provenance, and future of physical gold, not to mention the “stability” of the entire monetary regime based on rock solid, undisputed “faith and credit” in paper money, German Handelsblatt reports in an exclusive that the long suffering German gold, all official 3,396 tons of it, is about to be moved. Specifically, it is about to be partially moved out of the New York Fed, where the majority, or 45% of it is currently stored, as well as the entirety of the 11% of German gold held with the Banque de France, and repatriated back home to Buba in Frankfurt, where just 31% of it is held as of this moment. And while it is one thing for a “crazy, lunatic” dictator such as Hugo Chavez to pull his gold out of the Bank of England, it is something entirely different, and far less dismissible, when the bank with the second most official gold reserves in the world proceeds to formally pull some of its gold from the bank with the most. In brief: this is a momentous development, one which may signify that the regime of mutual assured and very much telegraphed – because if the central banks don’t have faith in one another, why should anyone else? – trust in central banks by other central banks is ending.