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I am dutch and read the news this week but I found it weird that a part of it went to England. I was expecting a European country.
by ivolimmen 26d ago
I am dutch and read the news this week but I found it weird that a part of it went to England. I was expecting a European country.
- retired 26d agoEngland is a country in Europe.
- onion2k 26d agoGeographically, yes, but that's not very important.
- sajithdilshan 26d agoLondon is still the financial hub in the Europe
- hadlock 26d ago[flagged]
- sajithdilshan 26d agoWhat do you mean for now? There is no other alternative in continental Europe due to language barrier
- owebmaster 26d agoWhy are you excluding Ireland?
- sajithdilshan 26d agoIreland is a tax-haven, not a financial hub.
- ben_w 26d agoEuronext collectively is big, but Euronext Dublin is about 1/27th the size of LSE by its own market cap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronext_Dublin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronext_Dublin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange That said, I'm not entirely clear how the exchange's market cap should or shouldn't be thought of in terms of the total market cap of assets that the exchange lets you trade. Or indeed the float of those assets, which is a concept I've only learned about due to SpaceX's nonsense IPO, so take my thoughts with an appropriate pinch of salt.
- chabska 26d agoWhy would language matter? Anyway, Frankfurt is the next biggest financial center after London, and it tend to get the business when a firm wants to move out of London .
- sajithdilshan 26d agoWhen it comes to being a financial hub English as a global language is paramount in modern world. You wouldn't expect a C-level executive from other side of the world to speak German. Further, if you've ever been in the financial scene in Frankfurt, it's unfortunately predominantly in German because most of the old people working in the institutions can only speak vacation English and they switch to German as soon possible. Also from where did you hear that Frankfurt gets the business that's leaving London? What is your source? That was the hope for the Germans with the Brexit, but it never happened. German laws and bureaucracy is still far too hostile and outdated compared to London.
- zhouzhao 26d ago>most of the old people working in the institutions A problem that will solve itself within the next few years
- sajithdilshan 26d agoAgree, the younger generation, or at least every young German (mostly millennials/GenZ) I’ve met is completely fluent in English, almost like native English speakers. Some even with an American accent which they picked up by watching YouTube videos
- tchalla 26d agoYes but we Germans are too stuck up with our language barriers.
- fakedang 26d agoAnd fax machines. Don't forget the fax machines.
- throwaway2037 26d agoThis post is weird. Finance people who work in Frankfurt and Amsterdam certainly speak English. Yes, they will also speak German, Dutch, and a variety of other langauges, but not speaking English is not the blocker here. I will also say that finance people in Paris under 40 are also (mostly) fluent in English. (Please don't bring up accent; no one in finance cares about your accent when speaking English; they care about your prices.)
- hvb2 26d agoLondon is not a financial center? Uh? By what metric? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index
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- ericmay 26d agoIt was apparently important enough for the OP to try and draw a distinction when none was needed…
- wazoox 26d agoEngland is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe". (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
- retired 26d agoIn all fairness, I deal with British tourists a lot and they always talk about "going to Europe" when they refer to their summer holiday in Benidorm.
- Oarch 26d agoWe are nothing, if not needlessly complex!
- ButlerianJihad 26d agoIn the San Francisco Bay Area, the locals refer to SF proper as “The City” (not “Frisco”.) So, they may live in Cupertino, Palo Alto, or Oakland, but when they say “we’re going to The City for a concert on Saturday!” we can hear them pronounce those capital letters as an unambiguous reference to the one, true City.
- kzrdude 26d agoI live in a city (a quite small one) and if I say that I'm going into the city, then it means I leave my neighbourhood (it's in the same city) and I'm going to the city centre.
- ben_w 26d agoSame. I'm in Berlin, I may say "I'm going to the city/town/village" for different parts of the city-state.
- hgoel 26d agoSame with NYC, "going to The City" usually just means going to Manhattan.
- sajithdilshan 26d agoI’m surprised why they don’t just move it back to their own country and put it in a safe in Netherland.
- jochem9 26d agoThe biggest chunk is in the Netherlands, but you want your gold also in other countries, so that you can still access is (and don't loose it) in case of an invasion. Hence almost half is in North America, a completely different (and (somewhat) allied) continent. It's also easier to sell in certain markets, such as London.
- hvb2 26d agoJust to be a pedant, 18.5 % in the US and same in Canada so 37%. I wouldn't call that almost half, it used to be about half before the move (NY at 31.3, 19.7 in Canada).
- clort 26d agoNot just so that you don't lose it in case of an invasion, but it is proof that you would be willing to help out the host country in the case they were invaded. Also, that you would not invade them. In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
- chihuahua 26d agoThe United States and Canada must have enjoyed that feeling of safety, knowing that the Netherlands would not invade them. And of course, if someone were to invade the United States (or Canada), knowing that the mighty Netherlands would come to their help would be immensely reassuring.
- consp 26d agoLondon has an old school gold exchange. Pretty much you can buy and sell by moving a part between vaults (at least that's how I understood it to work in the past). Now I expect it to be just a spreadsheet but who knows.
- zmgsabst 26d agoMy understanding is that it’s on shelves in a shared vault and you relabel who owns that shelf/slot/bin.
- MisterMunchkin 26d agoI wonder if anyone checks the gold. You could end up with the problem Amazon had, where people were inserting fake items into the supply chain and then it was just getting mixed into the real products and nobody could tell who was doing the fraud. Because instead of treating each item as an individual thing, they were pooling everything with other items of the same type. So if I send in a brick and say it’s an iPhone 17 and you order an iPhone 17, you might get my brick.
- ridgeguy 26d agoTungsten is 1.0015 times denser than gold. A gold-coated tungsten ingot could be adjusted (tiny internal cavity) to have exactly the same mass as a solid gold ingot of the same volume. I've no idea what checks are done to exclude such artifacts from gold storage. If somebody accepted them and stacked them in a reserve vault, they might go decades without discovery. I guess it's not something to worry about. It's improbable, and even so, if everybody agrees on the value of undetected bogus W/Au ingots, makes no difference from the real thing.
- crote 26d agoThere have been rumours like this about the US gold storage for decades. Its audits only look at a tiny percentage of the holdings at a time, any kind of weighing or purity inspection is the exception rather than the rule, and third-party auditors or observers are not welcome. They basically look at a handful of bars, see that the seals on the other vaults are intact, and extrapolate that all the gold is perfectly fine. In other words: the US could be pulling the fraud of the century here, and we'd never find out. But a full audit would be extremely expensive, there's no sign that there's any kind of foul play, and other countries are doing more-or-less the same. And even if a country does notice that something is off with their US holdings, there's plenty of reason to keep it quiet and just play along.
- t0mas88 26d agoTheir goal isn't only safe storage, it's also being able to sell when needed. You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. The reserve at the Bank of England is put there because there is a large market for gold trading there. So you can use the gold immediately to influence the markets. Putting it in a safe place in another European country wouldn't have added value over storage in Zeist.
- crote 26d ago> You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
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- a3qhg 26d agoThe narrative is that the continent is going to be overrun by Russia (at the rate of mile per year like in Ukraine). So the elites think they need the gold in London to pay for their exile government luxury.
- bwanab 26d agoNo, that isn't the narrative.
- wolvoleo 26d agoEngland is a European country. Just not EU.