France completely exited New York, the Netherlands roughly halved what they've stored there. That was in 2026. They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe.
Germany moved 111t from New York in 2016, and, afaict, nothing since then. There's still 1236t left.
Italy also keeps over 1000t in New York (no plans for repatriation).
> They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe
This is effectively outsourcing that process to the banks.
Banks can keep it in US and stay happy, they don't necessarily immediately need physical gold. So it's quite efficient, lots of govts do similar stuff.
> Banks can keep it in US and stay happy
If the Banque de France holds physical in New York and sells it to JPMorgan (nothing moves) and then in Paris buys contract for physical from UBS, there will probably need to be physical gold that moves.
In all likelihood, Swiss gold held by e.g. a Gulf customer might be sold to Paris (nothing moves) and JPMorgan may entice Venezuela to take those contracts on its balance sheet (nothing moves). But if it’s a big trade, the price of delivering physical in Paris (or Genève) will go above spot in New York at which point it’s profitable for JPMorgan to take delivery, load up planes and physically ship gold.
I imagine a convoy of small but heavily armored ships leaving New York, with nervous sailors clutching machine guns on the decks.
You wouldn't need many ships. The volume of a single shipping container is enough for 1300 tons of gold. Of course gold is extremely heavy, you'd need a specially built container to support that much gold, but the point is the storage space of any ocean going ship can comfortably carry the entire gold reserve of an entire country.
If you actually loaded gold into shipping containers and obeyed the weight restrictions, all the gold in the world would take up less than 8400 TEU, which would be considered a mid size cargo ship.
A real black eye for the regional police. 10-15 million spent on investigation, maybe 1 million recovered, and a few flunkies in prison.
This actually happened in 1965. De Gaulle, the president of France at the time, sent the French Navy over to America and took their reserve gold back home. This prompted other countries to do the same and by 1971 America had switched from a gold standard to a fiat currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
To supplement this, there was an interesting situation in 2025 [0] where a financial signal developed and we saw physical gold flows from London to New York. A very similar mechanism; governments do something, price signal develops, gold starts flying around.
[0] https://www.usagold.com/gold-arbitrage-trade-winds-down-amid...
agree with one minor quibble:
> load up planes and physically ship gold.
they would not load planes, they’d load ships, because it’s much cheaper.
The linked article title says “flown” but that could be expressive; is there any definitive evidence of the actual transport mechanism?
It does amuse me greatly that major world powers are trading large piles of stones in a place without moving them just like that. That's deeply satisfying.
> They didn't physically ship any of it, they sold it and rebought in Europe.
The Netherlands physically moved 27 tons of gold from the US and Canada (mostly New York) to the Netherlands this year.
Yea it was some transport, some just market sales and re-purchases.
The article is about the export of mined gold. The US produces ~160 tons of gold annually from domestic mining operations.
That’s an insane amount of gold production. I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces, moving and washing a massive amount of dirt and rocks.
Those guys are idiots on purpose to keep people watching.
It's a lot less interesting to watch someone optimize a spreadsheet and every once in awhile look out at a smoothly running operation.
> I watch gold rush and last season the two largest producer were just about 11k ounces
I remember watching the first couple seasons of that show. Every time it went to commercial break they'd try to hype up the melodrama with "we gotta do X or we're not gonna reach a thousand ounces!"
My wife and I still quote that to each other out of the blue.
It’s specifically nonmonetary gold, so that’s a separate issue unless those nations were holding non-reserve gold here.
Although a sibling commenter mentioned that they moved their gold by selling it and rebuying it in Europe. If that gold qualifies as non-reserve gold after sale, and is moved out after sale to (for example) China, then perhaps?
That's what I thought too but the article says it's mostly fresh mine output (and recycled).
Do they count as export if the owner doesn't change?
If central banks sell their gold in the US and buy new gold abroad (to save themselves physically transporting the gold across the ocean[0]), I suspect that the demand this creates for gold abroad will ultimately cause US gold exports to rise, too.
[0]: See the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50134172
Selling it in place neatly sidesteps suspicion about how secure the NY gold really is and if it's all really still there, too.
Do they count as export if the owner doesn't change?
I don't know. Does it count as export if it's not moved an inch?
From the article:
> The U.S. government is still reporting that its gold reserves are unchanged, so these exports look to be coming from current mine output and recycling operations.
Not sure if "The U.S governments gold reserves" also includes the ones from other countries though.
The answer is no. When talking about gold reserve that means U.S. Treasury-Owned Gold. Of which the volume hasn't changed much for decades.
Gold repatriation doesn't count as export. So the answer to "how much" is zero.
I don't think that counts as exports although they could be selling in the US and buying locally where traders move the gold (then it will be counted as exports).
So not actually productive exports. Just draining the coffers as the criminals in charge loot the commons.
Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
> Huh. I'd have thought that capacity would rise with ore supply. It is "free money". Why leave it in the ground?
> Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.
It is common for gold mines to shut down when the price of gold is low, or when technologies used cannot extract a profitable amount. Mines can quickly resume operations when either conditions are met.
Refining takes big machines and a lot of energy. It's pretty much the opposite of free money, you need to invest a lot to unlock the revenue stream.
China likes blocking various minerals such as rare earths to force countries to accept whatever outcome they desire.
I’m guessing those new mines opening are to limit the impact of this sort of situation in the future.
Somehow I read this as "God is now the top U.S. export", and it made sense at multiple levels.
Of course the Americans would sell God. And their mother. Well some Americans would, and the law would be on their side.
Actually they'd sell their god fearing fellow Americans, their goodness, and make a product out of them. They're the gold of the USA, but they're being destroyed by the straw-man-God propaganda industry.
Money is a virus that has no problem destroying the host. People ritually sell what don't belong to them all the time. Like the air we breathe, the native American lands, state power, or land on the moon. "Don't care" equals great profit. How is this ever going to end well?
Its 4am here, read the title bleary eyed and saw "God is now the top U.S. export", and thought, "yep that tracks".
How did it come to it that America supports the neo-Soviets, we have flying cars, AI is gradually taking over the world, billionaires own most of the world's wealth, and I just thought a heading like this is normal?
Speaks volumes of the results the policies to make the US a manufacturing and exporting country are getting.
Maybe tariffing everyone isn't really the path to prosperity?
For people who don't understand second and higher consequences, it sounds like a good one
The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.
This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.
The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.
There is a reason Pimps, Dealers bought gold chains versus kept cash. Cash and bank accounts could seized while what your arrested with, such as jewelry, is given back to you upon release.
Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.
It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Why couldn't jewelry or other items you are arrested with be seized as well if they can prove (or rather, if you can't disprove) they were bought with ill-gotten gains?
I have 30 lbs of gold plated PCB fingers that I have saved over the years. It might be time to figure out how to recycle and sell.
That’s not just a US boomer thing, you’ll see the same in many Arabic countries for example, across generations.
Fort Knox is for tourists
How much of this is exports being ranked by value, and gold, even a little being worth a lot, quickly becomes the “top” export despite being relatively small in absolute quantity terms?
Was anyone confused by the title and thought we are exporting more gold in volume or weight than other products? It seems obvious that gold must be winning on value.
Sort of, yeah. My reaction was "I know we export huge amounts of food, gold can't be a bigger business than that". But the answer is simply that gold is so vastly overpriced that it exceeds other goods as a result.
Exports are typically ranked in dollars, not in kilograms. Do we think about the weight of GPUs a country exports or their value?
From the article:
>That’s not just because the price of gold reached record high prices. In February 2026, the tons of gold exported may have set an all-time record.
> Normally, America’s highest value exports are either oil, pharmaceuticals, or aircraft and their parts. Not now. Starting in October 2025, the value of gold exports has topped all other categories almost every month.
From what I’m reading, the article does rank exports by value.
Relative to quantity, the price of gold might have less to do with why it’s the top of the list, but gold being more valuable in general might still be the main reason it’s at the top.
For example:
June
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $10 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
9 tons of gold exported - $90
By value, oil is the top export.
——-
July
Oil at $1 a barrel
Gold at $9 a ton
100 barrels of oil exported - $100
12 tons of gold exported - $108
By value, gold is now the top export.
——-
Even though the price of gold dropped—-the inverse of our current situation to illustrate an extreme—-the general higher price of gold is more relevant to the ranking than its quantity increase.
I feel like pharmaceuticals and aircraft are quite expensive by mass
With the proper facilities, isn’t it already economical to transmute mercury to gold via neutron bombardment?
If I am reading this correctly, then mercury-198 will receive a neutron, decay to mercury-197, then emit an electron to become gold-197.
Mercury has seven stable isotopes ranging from 195 to 204, so purifying to 198 is challenging (this isotope is 10% of the metal's occurrence). Would this require centrifuges as uranium does?
The decay chains of the other isotopes would be different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
"...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
The above reaction is at the end of the section.
You wouldn't enrich the 198 isotope, you'd just bombard natural mercury and chemically separate out the gold afterwards.
> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt. The value of a neutron in a nuclear reactor is the opportunity cost of it not hitting a uranium atom to produce fission. 1 mole of neutrons can produce about $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity assuming 40% efficiency. 1 mole of neutrons could alternatively produce 1 mole of gold, which is worth about $26,500. So it's roughly 4 times the market price of gold.
Of course there would be the cost of building and running the reactor and the associated chemical processes to collect the gold, but these cost are probably similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries. Certainly not 12 orders of magnitude more.
While it's not economical to make gold this way, it is economical to make certain medical isotopes this way.
>> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."
> Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt.
It is worth checking before accusing someone of making something up...
This appears to come from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l..., which states that the author of a 1980 experiment says "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment." That appears (from skimming sources) to come from a running cost of $5000/hr to produce a few hundred atoms of gold per hour. Modern methods are probably more efficient, but the number didn't come from nowhere.
Addendum: And per https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc, the LHC can turn lead into gold at a rate of 89000 nuclei per second, which is ridiculously far from economically reasonable. The LHC cost $9 billion and uses a lot of power, so I'd say not "similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries" used for gold.
No it really isn't. People have transmuted a few hundred milligrams of mercury into gold in the lab with multi-million dollar machines, but that doesn't make it economically viable in the slightest.
If sanctions become effective, the next best option for terrorists is gold. Logically the next step for them.
Tracking gold shipment is the next logical step for law enforcement.
So it's probably a short lived bubble, for anyone weighing investments.
its just unwinding from the tariff holdings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_Mine_(South_Dakota)
"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.
...
In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."
When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
> Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
Holy fucking badass move.
Judging by stock prices, I think the implicit expectation is that the US will soon start exporting a lot of AI.
The more likely explanation is everyone reckons the AI bubble is about to pop and is suddenly very interested in assets known to hold their value in times of turmoil
That would be a very convenient way to fix the trade balance that Trump is so obsessed about...
"There are multiple foreign governments growing leery of the future loss of purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, where they would prefer a different reserve asset with a better track record. Among all foreign central banks combined, the value of their gold reserves now exceeds their holdings of U.S. Treasury debt."
...
"When you put these factors together, my suspicion is that a high percentage of U.S. gold exports are going to China, though some must first detour through Swiss refineries to convert the gold into kilogram bars of acceptable purity. It is possible that the U.S. government may have acquiesced in this form of payment in return for other political concessions having to do with a number of global uncertainties."
-----------------
U.S. bond yields (the interest the U.S. pays on its debt) are increasing because there is less demand for U.S. treasury bonds. Lenders are reluctant to buy U.S. government debt, but the U.S. government needs that money, so it must pay more. This reduces the value of the USD (i.e. increases inflation) and makes the USD a less attractive reserve currency (A good reserve currency holds its value.)*. Gold is just one alternative option, but it is something the U.S. actually has a fair amount of. The U.S. would likely be exporting Swiss francs now if it had a lot of those too.
Why is there less demand for U.S. bonds? The U.S. is accruing a lot of debt with high spending and reduced taxes at the same time AI companies are competing for investment dollars (i.e. loans). There's only so much capital to go around, so interest rates go up.
TL;DR: U.S. spends too much. Taxes too little. AI companies spend too much. Make too little. Investors want more interest to supply cash, so U.S. bond yields go up and USD value goes down. Anyone looking for stable currencies to hold start switching to gold (or others). No grand Chinese conspiracy is necessary.
____________
* The USD is doing well at the current moment, almost inexplicably, but the important thing is what lenders think it will do in the future.
High rates can make the currency more attractive. Not less. Tends to strengthen the USD. So the next conclusion is also false.
But yes, higher yields can be related to demand, but they're not simply a function of demand. They relate to things like inflation expectations, and so the short term rates set by the Fed, and the risk premium. In this case likely the higher rates are not high due to demand but rather due to inflation expectations and the Fed having raised the overnight rate.
Bid to cover can be one estimate of demand and I'm not really seeing anything particularly exciting going on here: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/30431/us-10y-bid-to-cover-ra...
No, the top US export is still USD.
That is how we get all those imports cheaper than most countries. Trump just made a deal w Putin for example to import Russia’s diesel … in exchange for USD.
The U.S. government confirmed that its gold reserves remain unchanged, although the definition of "gold," is undergoing modernization.
Following efficiency measures affecting independent oversight in FY2025, the transition is expected to substantially reduce storage costs and security requirements. Under the program, gold bars are exchanged for TrumpBarz™, a cryptocurrency developed through a sovereign–foreign public–private partnership. Its ownership structure is described as "fully transparent," and reportedly associated closely with Mr. Putin, a connection officials dismissed as "purely geographical, financial, and personal.". "This is the biggest heist in history," reported The Downhill, shortly before being informed of violating various national security directives and revocations of its press credentials. The Trump administration declined to comment, while Mr. Musk noted in his interview to us: "Storing digital certificates is much more efficient than storing gold bars. We have reduced the weight of America’s gold reserves by 100% without changing a single number in the spreadsheet."
/s
ton for ton the US top export is CO², and it's largest import is O², or was, if it has slipped then that is the main reason behind the export of ag, as all of it is tied to actual industrial capacity
All the gold was stolen from Africa or South America by the Europeans no?
All the gold? Certainly not. That's just a meme at this point.
For example, Brazilians love to say that the Portuguese stole their gold. Even the highest estimates I could find amount to like 1000 tons of gold which works out to around 135 billion dollars today. Meanwhile, the government robs them of several times that amount every single year: tax revenue is currently around 815 billion dollars.
The biggest gold mines by far are in the US, Russia, and other former Soviet republics.
If you think that USD value will drop sharply, it's a logical thing to do.
It’s more of losing trust in the US. If they don’t believe they’ll have access to it when needed or if they believe it might be seized for whatever made up reason, makes sense to move it somewhere they’ll have control over it.
Probably not. This is non-monetary gold mostly going off to refiners. Not bullion.
Why would the dropping value of the USD be a factor in selling gold? Doesn't holding gold hedge against exactly that?
I think the real reason is that they're afraid of political instability in the US that may result in 1) an inability to retrieve their gold, or 2) the government confiscating it.
I don't quite follow. Countries hold gold to protect their own currency from devaluation, not bc they expected it to become stronger against a dollar.
How does holding gold protect from devaluation? No one has currency backed by gold any more.
I don't think holding gold does much, but in theory, a central bank could prop up its currency by selling the gold. It's like selling any other asset.
> How does holding gold protect from devaluation?
I think the idea is to rise the value of your currency, you rise the demand for your currency, by selling for it something that everybody wants, like gold.
Of course this demand is artificial and you'll run out of hold to sell at some point, but it can hopefully carry you over thd bump.
I still don’t get it. Why does everyone want gold? Its uses are some types of electronics and jewelry. Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.
Sincere question.
It’s similar to the valuation of crypto, being based on scarcity and mutual agreement, but without the risk of losing your funds from hacks or bugs, and without the benefit of online transfer. You can put it in a hole in the ground and it will be the exact same in 50 years. It’s shiny and has a history.
Nations like to use it for reserves because it’s stable, historically fit for the purpose of exchange, and well-understood. You can “count” it and use this to settle balances in a way that outsiders can’t easily interfere with.
Almost all “value” is strange and complex. Why is Francium, which is less useful than even gold, worth a theoretical $28 billion per ounce? (Not that you would find any buyers for that quantity.) Why is a Black Lotus card worth $3 million? Why is a dollar worth whatever you can buy for a dollar?
Why is a bitcoin worth anything?
Why is anything worth anything?
The short but final answer: because other people want it.
Gold ingot relative rarity + desirability + physical durability means it's a 'physical good' that is likely to retain value above a relative floor...ie it will always be worth something to someone, and virtually every country tracks their own estimate. Gold is a standard element of trade historically as it's a little difficult to steal (easier to defend physically) while being fairly simple to verify and measure.
The value of Gold isn't linked to any currency.
Money is just paper (or a number) and can be de-valuated. Gold doesn't.
To trade with Anunnaki. They need it to repair Nibiru's failing atmosphere.
LOL
Massivly surprised to see a link to this storyline/paradigm here on HN, great!
Cheers! :-))
You'd be surprised what livered onions go for on Zeta Reticula.
I really like this conspiracy behind this story/tale!
If you belive in such stories, it may explain why humans are so focused on Gold, and not other precious metals, which are much more rare.
The idea behind the story is just great, isnt it? The idea of whatever space travelling species to come here to mine for gold with human "robots" is really cool. While they could have landed on asteroids which much more Gold-per-ton, they chosed earth because the bio machines available here didnt need any "outer planetary" maintenance or refills?
:-D
edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?
You can see it is true in how well we folow instructions but as soon as we build any kind of hierarchy we act like we are in a tunnel chiseling riches as if there wont be food end of the shift. Ï would design them like that, no uprising, no revolution, no union. Their biggest fear, universal basic income, no more digging.
Half a million years later we are still at it. Innovation is like, rock music, bitcoin mining, minecraft etc
Pretty deep
> edit: and they can replicate easily given enough environment, so you do not need spareparts when e.g. a disk fails?
Now I understand why humans are cattle, not pets. The overlords designed it right.
Gold has been valued across almost all cultures for thousands of years. That creates an expectation that it will still be valued.
And, gold is limited (in recoverable quantities) in Earth's crust. Nobody can print a bunch more of it, unlike fiat currency.
Between those two, it's what many people reach for when they fear that the government is going to devalue their currency. They can buy now, with currency that will soon be worth less, and what they buy will be worth something even after the currency becomes worth less.
> Why does everyone want gold?
Because you sell it cheap.
> Almost seems like crypto, it has value because it is somewhat rare… and everyone else also thinks it has value.
Exactly.
It has value because it won't spoil and you can sell it later gor the same or more because it's scarce.
If you have USD and you think it will value less soon, you change it to gold instead.
If you own gold in the US and think that the USD value will drop very low, you move out of the USD fearing gold retention.
But there isn’t a good reason to think that since countries such as Italy, UK, France, and others are in much worse financial positions.
A lot of this stuff is just business as usual, and then tabloids like to turn it into some doom and gloom nonsense.
I didn’t mention Germany, not that it’s bad to include it. But unlike the others the US has a growing economy.
Thanks for posting and I do mean it. I hope my post didn’t come across snarky I really don’t mind the inclusion of Germany there. :)
If you sell something in US, you get paid in US dollars. If you believe dollars soon won't be worth the paper they are printed on, you immediately spend dollars on something that has durable value and take it with you instead.
It's more like if you think Trump is likely to say, actually that's my gold.
They think the Trump administration will confiscate it.
Whatever would give them that idea…
Gold is tiny compared to oil and other energy exports. I would more watch for drop in energy exports, and how US is screwing its partners right now!