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🇩🇪🇺🇸 Where’s the gold? Germany’s conservatives sound the alarm over reserves in the US
Can the United States be trusted with Germany’s gold?
[S]ome politicians in Germany are worried that what was for decades seen as one of the world’s most reliable storehouses might not be so secure after all.
Germany holds the world’s second-largest gold reserves, and keeps 37 percent of them — some 1,236 metric tons, worth €113 billion — in the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve. Those holdings of precious metal guarantee that, should the need ever arise, the Bundesbank has access to something it can change into U.S. dollars (or any other hard currency).
The very idea that they might not be safe would have been considered ridiculous from 1945 ... until a couple of weeks ago. But the certainties of Germany’s postwar existence have been turned on their head and — as the recent scrapping of a notorious cap on public borrowing showed — the unthinkable is suddenly very ...