The transfer was carried out partially by buying and selling and partly by physically transferring gold, the Dutch national bank said.

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[–] 197 points 2 months ago (19 children)

As a Canadian I cant help but interpret this as nothing against Canada, but insecurity about our increasingly belligerent neighbour.

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  • [–] 108 points 2 months ago* (10 children)

    That is basically it yeah. The vast majority of gold was moved from the US (essentially 41% of Dutch gold reserves in the US were moved out), while we barely moved anything out of Canada.

    The official reason is "crisis preparedness", but I believe the actual unofficial and unspoken reason is that the US is simply too unreliable to store our gold.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    But isn't that exactly being prepared for the crisis?

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  • [–] 47 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    Yes. Crisis preparedness is just polite talk for "we expect shit to hit the fan, so we are acting on it".

    IMO, it's way worse than just claiming the US is unreliable.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The US has been unreliable for the entirety of its history. They relate to both world wars, and they've equipped numerous would be terrorists and dictators in various banana republics.

    Also they play Baseball which everybody knows is just Rounders which they renamed

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I think the implication is that the crisis could be anything and not to the result of any particular specific concern.

    Where as everybody knows that it's because Trump is going to try and become a dictator in November when he inevitably will have a tantrum about losing the midterms.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I'm already relieved it was still there. But it is likely not the same gold that we put there - there recently was a story about that.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    We're afraid the US might attack Canada and then Canada conquers our gold and keeps it as spoils of war. Not that you don't deserve it, but better it be someone else's gold.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (3 children)

    Idk if we could pull of anything other then a repel, if anything we'd encourage a splitting of the the USA, it's clear a certain half of the country can't be trusted and should never have been let back in without letting them fail on their own first.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 months ago

    I don't blame them. It's very hard to retrieve your treasure from a sunken ship.

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  • [–] 65 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    This is the second story/country like this I’ve read about recently doing this same thing. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a political signal or if these countries are anticipating some kind of breakdown in their ability to access the gold if it remains in the US. Do they think we wouldn’t give it up? Do they expect there will be war on this continent? Do they fear Trump will plunder it? It’s a somewhat unsettling consideration.

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  • [–] 41 points 2 months ago

    The US kidnapped the Venezuelan leader to get to their oil, has threatened military invasion of Greenland, and is constantly showing that laws do not apply, why would any nation want to keep gold in the US?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Maybe you should read more rather than rabble rabble rabble for political agendas.

    The Dutch moved 122,5 tons of gold from the US in 2014. In your context Obama was a higher threat than Trump.

    Good game though.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Damned right move. Trump could simply claim it all and wtf is anyone gonna do about it?

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    As an American, I always thought winning would look different.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    If you are above the 1% in wealth in the US, these are the best times for you in American history. Measurably much better than the gilded age.

    We're almost coming to parity with medieval pre revolution France.

    • A wildly unequal treatment by the justice system
    • The will of the public is not represented in what government does.
    • Massive national (public) debt
    • Disconnected leaders vs frustrated starving peasants who feel they have no future.
    • Profligate royal spending
    • A huge wealth gap across society
    • Increasingly poor treatment of the peasantry by the wealthy driving a breakdown of societal trust
    • regressive Taxation focussed on lower class paying for everything
    • Useless foreign wars that serve no national interest.

    Its all pretty much spot on. All we lack is someone with the formal title "king", a few droughts and extreme weather, and a run of bankruptcies and we are all the way there, or even past the french situation.

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    [–] 15 points 2 months ago (13 children)

    I hope they tested the gold bars for e.g. tungsten rods.

    And i hope our national bank gets smart enough to follow that move.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (12 children)

    Here are your 50 tons of depleted uranium bars.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    They do have a nice and close weight, but their radioactivity gives them away.

    Tungsten has a density of 19.25g/cm3. Compared to Gold with 19.32g/cm3, they are rather close. Uranium is a little less dense at 19.16g/cm3.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    idk, i'd rather have the tungsten than the gold

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    WTF! We can do that? Just post gifs on the internet?!

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    No but seriously how did you do that? Did you upload a .gif as an image? This will open up an ocean of... Good use for me!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    there should be a button to view the source of my comments, but basically:

    ![alt text](imagesourcehtmllink)

    for those of y'all who would like to skip the tutorial, skip itif you include the ! it renders the image or gif (the link needs to be a direct path to the image, not just the page it's on. it might take a little experimenting. it did for me) and if you don't it just has the text and a link to the image.

    without the !

    first image: I NEED TUNGSTEN TO LIVE

    with the !

    first image: I NEED TUNGSTEN TO LIVE

    i have been told if we add "hovertext" after the link (but still in the parens) we can add hovertext, but i haven't experimented with nor figured it out yet so i can't really advise you on it, sorry. there's always bigger fish.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Lol, they're scared it won't be there later if Trump gets desperate.

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  • [–] [S] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Desperate or vindictive. There was a recent debate over whether the EU should use the money in the Russian accounts it suspended to bankroll Ukraine, because Russia owes Ukraine reparations. One of the reasons that might not be a good idea is that a lot of EU money is in the USA, and with Trump it's monkey see, monkey do. Except for "the EU should" read "the USA should", for "Russian accounts" read "EU accounts", for "bankroll Ukraine" read "line Trump's pockets", and for "because Russia owes Ukraine reparations" read "because Trump likes money".

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Good move, I wouldn't be surprised if the tangerine douchebag is using gold from the vault to play Scrooge Mcduck.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    I wish he did. Let him dive from a high board onto a pile of gold coins. It would be like diving onto concrete. No way he’d survive.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    "People say I dive like no one has dived in the history of diving. Right into a tremendous pile of golden...👐gold. I'll be surrounded by the gold. Amazing if I say so myself. It's like a bath. A large gigantic bath of gold.

    A golden shower is what I'm getting at. 👐"

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    You load 16 tons what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

    Don The Con already used it to make gold toilets.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago

    "Shit. That gold was earmarked for the ballroom plumbing! We can never have a nice ballroom now!" /s

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Germany should do the same.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    Smart move.

    As an aside, this does not bode well for us hanging onto the dollar as the world reserve currency through 2028 and beyond.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    It is my firm belief that the only reason a President would want that — would be that he actually was trying to destroy the country, not just on accident through incompetence, but deliberately through malice or undisclosed foreign pressures/influences…

    Which is the pinnacle of treason, by the way.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    What about the 122 tons of gold the Dutch moved in 2014?

    Or is this just news because of politics?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago
    [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    If they can kidnap another country leader, and the entire alliance says nothing, you know they will say nothing of the US did the same to Canada.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Does this count as an import to the UK and do/can they tariff it?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago
    [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Take me with

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    IT would've made more sense to move to Canada... or the Netherlands.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Why would Canada be any better? It only seems like a decent country because of their Southern Neighbor.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    I'm genuinely surprised we coughed it up. A similar request by Germany took years to fulfill.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Didn't a country make a tidy profit by doing the selling and buying?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    "Of course we have your gold!! We just perform a very complex set of financial operations on it so you can't actually get the gold but we can give you a paper receipt to show that you own it!"

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