Is Germany joining the gold rush:
It took them seven years to get the last lot back:
Anyone would think that The Fed. didn’t have the gold 
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Oh we have it and anyone can get it back at any time. Just sign these papers saying you will become a state in the United States. England we have a spot for you at 52 just behind Canada and just ahead of Germany at 53. Come on in the waters fine.
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Fractional Reserve Banking was born when gold warehouses discovered that that could lend out out some of the gold deposited by their customers who would not be the wiser. I think it’s fair to call it fraud. Legalized fraud.
Shorting stocks is the same racket.
A buys 100 shares
B borrows 100 shares from A to sell (short)
C buys the 100 shares
D borrows 100 shares from C to sell (short)
E buys the 100 shares
D borrows 100 shares from E to sell (short)
F buys the 100 shares
F borrows 100 shares from F to sell (short)
The part I love is the squeeze baby, squeeze! Same chain reaction as bank runs and nuclear power.
The Captain
It’s definitely not fraud if it’s disclosed to depositors, which I presume it is. It’s the basis of the entire banking system, so I’m pretty sure most people understand it, even if they don’t when a bank run starts.
I understand that my bank deposits are not sitting in a vault in the basement, but that the bank is using them to loan to others to build houses or businesses or whatever. I’d guess most others do too.
Not Hetty Green, once described as the richest woman in America (and The Witch of Wall Street), and who is said to have trundled down to the bank every Friday and was led to the downstairs vault where she could count here deposits and make sure they were all right there. Interesting case. Perhaps apocryphal story, dunno. She was worried about “fraud” too, of course that was in the days before FDIC.
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The herd is well trained. It’s been legalized. You don’t need to point that out. 
The Captain
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Not explained in the article, why is Germany (or any other country) storing gold in the US? Why don’t they have their own Ft Knox?
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I suspect that this goes back to the days post WW2 when the USA was seen as a safe place. Don’t forget that after WW2 Germany was divided into two and there was a perceived threat of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe at the time.
It is apparently quite common in the T&Cs for a deposit taker of gold to be allowed to lease that gold to offset the costs of holding it.
This was highlighted when Australia got its gold back from the BofE when they didn’t get the exact bars back. This led to numerous conspiracy theories:
Post WWII. Many countries stored gold in the US since we were peaceful, prosperous, and not bombed out with roving gangs of looters everywhere, nor susceptible to revolution.
Because gold is bought and sold by countries all the time it made sense to just keep it here and reassign ownership (they put it on pallets and move it up and down the hall) rather than load it on airplanes and boats and trans ship it around the world every time there’s an ownership change. Mostly done at the Fed HQ in NY. Underground
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It is the easiest. Gold is a big pain to handle. So when central banks buy and sell gold, they simply sign it over to each other and leave it sitting in the vault.
Now that our government is no longer trust worthy, they are starting to repatriate it.
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Because it would be harder for the Soviets to get it by invasion?
Besides, NYC is supposed to be the financial center of the universe. Some say the NY Fed has far more gold than Ft Knox.
Steve
It facilitates delivery in key markets. It also has advantages should Germany get run over by foreign troops…