“Official representatives of the Bundesbank must personally count the bars and document their results,” Bild quoted him as saying.
In the past, the idea that gold stored in official vaults may not be safe has generally been the preserve of cranks and conspiracy theorists. However, it has been revived, ironically, by none other than the billionaire and éminence grise of the Trump administration, Elon Musk, who has called for an inspection of the U.S.’s own gold reserves.
You do not talk about Bullion Club
For the Deutsche Bundesbank, which is tasked with the safe management of Germany’s most valuable financial asset, the first rule of Bullion Club is you do not talk about Bullion Club, and you most certainly don’t cast aspersions on fellow members.
“We have a trustworthy and reliable partner in the Fed in New York for the storage of our gold holdings,” said Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel during a February press conference, a comment that the bank directed POLITICO back to on Friday. “It does not keep me awake at night. I have complete confidence in our colleagues at the American central bank.”
However, it’s barely a decade since the Bundesbank was jolted into similar action, when the more immediate public concern was that Germany’s accumulated wealth would be frittered away bailing out the rest of the eurozone.
In 2013, a noisy campaign driven by right-wing populists — which resonated enough with the broader population to embarrass then-Chancellor Angela Merkel — led to the Bundesbank repatriating all of the gold it had previously stored in the Bank of France’s vaults. At the time, the Bundesbank argued that it no longer needed a means to access foreign currency in Paris, now that Germany and France shared the euro.
Today, over half of the Bundesbank’s reserves are stored on its premises in Frankfurt. Outside the U.S., the remaining 13 percent is held at the Bank of England.
