Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 January 3

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January 3

Who do so many countries keep their gold at the bank of England. They can store the gold in their own countries.

As above 102.33.34.102 (talk) 17:51, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

The Bank of England stores around half a million bars of gold. They keep track of how many are owned by each client. The client can be a country. The client can be a company. The client can by a person. Having them in the Bank of England provides security becasue they are guaranteed by the bank and replaced if stolen. It also provides ease of use. If I owned some bars there and you owned some bars there, I could easily transfer a bar to you by telling the bank that I wanted to do so. They don't need to actually move a bar of gold. They just update the ownership ledger. As for storing gold in your own country, that is based on the assumption of stability. If a government is overthrown, all gold locally held by the government will be taken by the new government. Having a large supply of gold in the country is an incentive to overthrow the government. By storing it outside the country, the new government has to convince the bank that they should legally have access to the gold. It is far more difficult to do. For example, when the Taliban overthrew the Afghanistan government, they were faced with the task of convincing financial institutions that they should have access to the funds. The United States froze the national funds, refusing to let the Taliban access them. I believe they are still frozen. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 18:12, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building#Gold vault provides some related information. Cullen328 (talk) 22:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Just get all your gold out before 2060. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 16:14, 4 January 2024 (UTC)