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Comment by tonfa | Hacker News Reader

They do. Switzerland sold more than half of their gold in the past 20 years, including all their holdings at the Federal Reserve in New York (that's like 1300 tons of gold that was sold, in comparison the hundreds of tons that are mentioned on the article for germany and netherlands).

Not sure why the article doesn't mention that fact, maybe it doesn't feed into the FUD/conspiracy theory?

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it is mentioned in other circles where this is widely and passionately discussed. and the "conspiracy theory" burns on as it is suspected China is buying the worlds gold at an "alarming" rate...with the theory being a gold backed currency is in the works.

until the world stops needing oil to function, no one is going to care much.

Absolutely. If people don't trust that the fed has all its gold, people would be wary of buying gold in there. But Switzerland managed to sell 1300 tons of it, presumably at reasonable prices for the time. That's a lot of buyers who don't worry about their purchases not existing.

Did Switzerland sell them themselves, i.e. were they flown back to Switzerland first or was the sale done by the Fed?

I would assume the gold is typically never traded by moving it physically between location, but just brought into a vault where both parties have an account (like the Fed, or London)

They didn't say how much gold they had at the Fed, just that they used to and that they no longer have any.

https://www.bullionstar.com/gold-university/central-bank-gol... has a bunch of data.

For example with the sell via the BIS, I assume they just transferred the gold within the Berne vault to BIS (BIS has an account there), and then let the BIS handle the sale. The London gold was likely already there.

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