All of these links are from publications I've never heard of, and have a hard time independently verifying their credibility.
For instance, TradeInt advertises it is trusted by Samsung, but I can't find any record of Samsung utilizing TradeInt for anything. TradeInt advertises a 5-star rating on platforms like Product Hunt (YC S14), yet the person who created the listing created their account when TradeInt launched and has no followers or other activity since 2024.
They all appear to be blog spam, from my perspective.
Would have thought advertising and transaction fees myself, but the article says it's usually oil (ok I should have thought of that), "pharmaceuticals" (mkay, seems cheaper to make elsewhere so that's a bit strange), or aircraft and their parts (wut? How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!)
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?
Airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as the engine production capacity of GE and P&W are booked for years to come. Also, unlike Airbus which has multiple final assembly plants across the world, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.
No, Boeing does final assembly in Zhoushan, China for 737s. Airbus does final assembly in EU (Hamburg, Toulouse), US (Alabama), Canada, and China (Tianjin).
The Zhoushan "Completion Center" is not an assembly line - it only handles interior fitment and exterior paint on aircraft that are otherwise fully assembled and have been flown from the production lines in Renton or Everett. The Airbus assembly lines outside the EU perform actual assembly of fuselage and wing components into complete aircraft.
Because in-patent pharmaceuticals are a LOT more expensive than out of patent ones their monetary value is far greater than the greater volume of out of patent pharmaceuticals. If you look at where big pharma makes its revenues and their sales relative to generics sellers you can see this. Because of that the cost of making them is not really that important.
As for aircraft, not that many in number, but very expensive things with very expensive parts.
> How many aircraft can the world need that it commonly tops the export chart of the wealthiest country?!
Consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the far east.
If a European buys a product "made by" Apple or nvidia or Nike or Levis - that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, or wherever. America still gets the profits, though.
Anthropic's quarterly revenue is $16 billion. Assuming they are 40% of the ai market, pretend that all the ai market is american, and pretend all tokens are exclusively sold abroad, that would make AI tokens 7.3% of US exports, comparable to aircraft (7.5%). Of course in reality only a small portion of these tokens are american exports.
That really puts it in perspective in a nice way, thank you. These multiples really give a distorted sense of scale even when you know current production is not what is being valued
I wonder how much of that are foreign central banks moving their gold reserves out of the USA... France, The Netherlands and Germany have been moving gold.
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).
It's a long story, but Italy's gold is not really Italy's, in the normal sense. Italy lost WWII, and has been a de facto "vassal" of the US since then; the US has several military bases in Italy, and has a very strong influence on anything related to foreign policy, etc. Don't take my word for it, there's not a single link to prove this, but a bit of research should make what I say at least plausible.
Just to give a small hint: the 1998 "strage del Cermis" [0], in which a US aircraft mistakenly cut a cable supporting a cable car and resulted in the killing of 20 people. The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, and his navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were put on trial in the United States and were found not guilty.
Try to imagine something different. An Italian military aircraft flies in the US, and mistakenly kills 20 people. What would have happened to the Italian pilot?
I remember that incident vividly. They did not "just" mistakenly cut a cable; they were hotdogging below allowed elevations in forbidden, populated areas.
The official story is that the maps they were given were out-dated and led to confusion in their location.
It was painfully obvious that the incident was inspired more by Top Gun than those notoriously bad maps the USAF uses....
But as you say, the USA investigated itself and assured its little buddy Italy that there was nothing improper. So sorry about those dead folks.
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).
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?
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.
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.
All their properties are played out. They're scraping the bitter dregs from properties that used to produce a massive amount more gold using extremely primitive tech to do so. In some cases, they're just re-running old mining tailings and scraping the ground at the edges of areas they knew were good.
If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.
10 million (troy?) ounces is 311 metric tons. That's plenty of gold, but doesn't seem terribly impressive compared to 160 tons annually? Also, to get that 10 million onces figure, I think you must be including the mid-20th century dredging and hydraulic mining era? That stuff was a far cry from humble prospectors with pans like people might imagine.
No, I am comparing the amount of gold currently pulled from the Klondike. 11,000 ounces of gold from a (looks to me) single large operation pales in comparison to anything of yesteryear. 100 tons/year is quite the haul. Yukon currently is doing more like 3.5 tons/year in total. Nevada is just on a totally different scale.
Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.
Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"
Theres one mine outside a town, that has more gold than all of America.
Half the worlds lithum for example also comes from WA. Most of the worlds treasures that are dug out of the ground can also be found there. Most of it has never seen a person, theres far more there to be found one day in the future.
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.
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.
If you sell something in US, you get paid in US dollars. If you believes dollars soon won't be worth the paper they are printed on, you immediately spend dollars of something that has durable value and take it with you instead.
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.
> What makes you think they are are worse financial positions?
Broadly speaking: low growth, high debt, aging populations, aging infrastructure, and very intense economic pressure from countries like the US and China, but also increasing competition with the rising of other countries for global resources.
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.
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.
To understand the Gold thesis, I would suggest people to fire up their agents, point it at Luke Gromen's youtube channel, download all the transcripts for last 3-4 years of videos and ask your agent to do a faithful analysis. There is tonne of alpha in that.
In Brazil, taxation is theft. This is a country that taxes its population at Europe levels but delivers developing country tier services. You just know the money is going into the pockets of politicians, judges and other elites.
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
From Jehovah's witnesses to Scientology, and certain strains of evangelical Christianity. God (and aliens) is still a very export oriented industry in the US.
> majority of gold exports are going to Switzerland, almost certainly to the refiners there
Sounds like a refining bottleneck.
Globally, “refining capacity is operating at near-total utilization” [1]. That is particularly true in America, where refiners are “limiting purchases” [2] and “turning away new clients” [3].
Global demand for gold—lead by China—is surging. That, in turn, made gold “the most-developed commodity over 2020-25” with “the highest [new] mine count each year during the period” [4].
Where are those mines opening? In “Australia, Canada and the US,” which “accounted for the largest share of new gold production.”
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.
> Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine?
OG PoW.
Less facetiously: refined gold is a commodity. Gold ores are various and require expertise to differentiate and value. They're also bulky relative to their gold content.
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.
> It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.
You've just described a large part of why Jews are so prominent in gem and jewelry trade. If a family's real estate and capital wealth are seized by Christian rulers, jewels and precious metals are the best value-by-weight to sneak a portion of it out during a pogrom.
The other reason is the Christian historically yes-and-no relationship with usury (banking).
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 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.
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.
> "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment."
"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."
The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.
Read the original text. Several of the gold daughter isotopes are unstable.
Do I need to find this for you, idiot?
I'm in a mood to be especially caustic for one who is flatly wrong...
Edit: Moron!
"In 1941, Rubby Sherr, Kenneth Bainbridge and Herbert H. Anderson synthesized gold from mercury with neutron bombardment using the cyclotron at Harvard University, but the isotopes of gold were all radioactive."
> I'm in a mood to be especially caustic for one who is flatly wrong...
Comments like this are never acceptable here, no matter how right you are or feel you are. This site is for people who have basic standards of decency, at the very least. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"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.
"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.
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.
Exporting gold isn't an improvement in exports by the way. Exporting gold means people are betting your currency is overvalued. Exporting a huge amount of gold means people are betting your currency is incredibly overvalued. Gold being your #1 export means you're screwed, when alongside many other signs that also mean you're screwed.
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 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."
174 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadhttps://logisticsmaterial.com/trade/americas-biggest-exports...
https://imgur.com/a/bAbAFru
For instance, TradeInt advertises it is trusted by Samsung, but I can't find any record of Samsung utilizing TradeInt for anything. TradeInt advertises a 5-star rating on platforms like Product Hunt (YC S14), yet the person who created the listing created their account when TradeInt launched and has no followers or other activity since 2024.
They all appear to be blog spam, from my perspective.
Airliners and military aircraft are expensive. Consider that nearly the entire aircraft production capacity of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin as well as the engine production capacity of GE and P&W are booked for years to come. Also, unlike Airbus which has multiple final assembly plants across the world, Boeing only does final assembly in the US.
As for aircraft, not that many in number, but very expensive things with very expensive parts.
Consider how many American companies exclusively manufacture in the far east.
If a European buys a product "made by" Apple or nvidia or Nike or Levis - that's not an American export, it's an export of Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, or wherever. America still gets the profits, though.
A lot of components are actually imports from other countries, eg Japan manufactures wings.
We don't export nor import "net" anything. The definition of exports is not affected by imports.
So many trillion-dollar valued AI-focused companies.
How are service exports counted? All together? Or not considered exports?
Literally the link in the first paragraph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IEAXGG.
It’s conventional, in American English, for exports unadorned to mean just goods. It’s anachronistic. But it isn’t wrong.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyn8q8gqxo
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).
The Netherlands physically moved 27 tons of gold from the US and Canada (mostly New York) to the Netherlands this year.
How many other bank or multiples around the world would be able to support such a sale ?
Intercontinental Exchange launches trading in gold futures in London - https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/e5d7ca...
Just to give a small hint: the 1998 "strage del Cermis" [0], in which a US aircraft mistakenly cut a cable supporting a cable car and resulted in the killing of 20 people. The pilot, Captain Richard J. Ashby, and his navigator, Captain Joseph Schweitzer, were put on trial in the United States and were found not guilty.
Try to imagine something different. An Italian military aircraft flies in the US, and mistakenly kills 20 people. What would have happened to the Italian pilot?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
The official story is that the maps they were given were out-dated and led to confusion in their location.
It was painfully obvious that the incident was inspired more by Top Gun than those notoriously bad maps the USAF uses....
But as you say, the USA investigated itself and assured its little buddy Italy that there was nothing improper. So sorry about those dead folks.
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?
Not sure if "The U.S governments gold reserves" also includes the ones from other countries though.
You gotta remember, if those miners weren't basically jumped up amateurs they wouldn't be on a tv show.
If the price of gold didn't go up several thousand percent since the Klondike Gold Rush, there would be 0 reason to be up there at all. The Klondike produced -- on the low end of estimates -- 10 million ounces of gold worth in 10's of billions of dollars in today's money.
Also Yukon (and that show) is majority placer, while Nevada looks to be hard rock? Hitting a rich vein means a massive payday, but even if not, the amount of rock they're moving is absolutely bonkers. Look at some of the massive craters they're digging out! 10, 20, 30 feet of topsoil to get to a few feet of pay gravel over a few dozen acres of ground is just not the same thing.
Dunno even what reclaimation looks like for a 1/2 mile deep crater. I'm guessing, "nothing lol deal with it"
Admittedly I live in a state roughly 3x the area of Texas.
Crazy idea go look at a map.
Theres one mine outside a town, that has more gold than all of America.
Half the worlds lithum for example also comes from WA. Most of the worlds treasures that are dug out of the ground can also be found there. Most of it has never seen a person, theres far more there to be found one day in the future.
That wouldn't be an export as they already own the gold.
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.
Germany 47.2 USA 96.7 France 108.8 Italy 127.7
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
Germany 47.2; 1.3
UK 93.8; 1.3
USA 96.7; 2.3
France 108.8; 0.4
Italy 127.7; 0.8
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
Either. You can check major sources (WSJ, Financial Times, &c.)
> because the official ones are very questionable?
I trust the institution regardless of what party is in power.
Broadly speaking: low growth, high debt, aging populations, aging infrastructure, and very intense economic pressure from countries like the US and China, but also increasing competition with the rising of other countries for global resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102?wprov=sfl...
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.
Silence - The Deconstruction of Faith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj7SGe7FcYE
Sounds like a refining bottleneck.
Globally, “refining capacity is operating at near-total utilization” [1]. That is particularly true in America, where refiners are “limiting purchases” [2] and “turning away new clients” [3].
Global demand for gold—lead by China—is surging. That, in turn, made gold “the most-developed commodity over 2020-25” with “the highest [new] mine count each year during the period” [4].
Where are those mines opening? In “Australia, Canada and the US,” which “accounted for the largest share of new gold production.”
[1] https://www.skillings.net/gold-refining-report-global-standa...
[2] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/metal-refiners-t...
[3] https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/refining-pipelin...
[4] https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insight...
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.
I’m guessing those new mines opening are to limit the impact of this sort of situation in the future.
> 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.
Why should gold be worth that much more in a bank vault than an underground mine? You’re not going to touch either of them!
Just get a note saying you own the gold in whatever cubic foot below ground marked by some coordinate system.
OG PoW.
Less facetiously: refined gold is a commodity. Gold ores are various and require expertise to differentiate and value. They're also bulky relative to their gold content.
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.
Need cash on hand, pawn it or use it as collateral for a loan.
It is away around the legal system to retain wealth.
Yes, absolutely, and it goes back farther than criminals. Why do you think everyone's grandma has a jewelry collection, while less of the youth do? Because before the 70s, women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts. Their gold and jewelry was the only type of wealth they could keep for themselves.
The other reason is the Christian historically yes-and-no relationship with usury (banking).
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.
> "...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.
> 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.
"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."
The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.
Read the original text. Several of the gold daughter isotopes are unstable.
Do I need to find this for you, idiot?
I'm in a mood to be especially caustic for one who is flatly wrong...
Edit: Moron!
"In 1941, Rubby Sherr, Kenneth Bainbridge and Herbert H. Anderson synthesized gold from mercury with neutron bombardment using the cyclotron at Harvard University, but the isotopes of gold were all radioactive."
> I'm in a mood to be especially caustic for one who is flatly wrong...
Comments like this are never acceptable here, no matter how right you are or feel you are. This site is for people who have basic standards of decency, at the very least. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My outburst should have been concealed in more diplomatic language, I'll grant.
I am frightened of what I'm doing next (driving to Mazatlan).
Begging your pardon.
"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.
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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.
Holy fucking badass move.
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"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."
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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.
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...
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.
Its a dumb stunt for people who have no idea of the actual numbers.
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