BUNDESBANK TRANSFERRED 210 TONNES OF GERMAN GOLD IN 2015 / THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Bundesbank transferred 210 tonnes of German gold in 2015

Henry Sanderson

 

©Bloomberg

 

 

Germany’s Bundesbank released further detail on its gold holdings on Wednesday, saying it transferred 210 tonnes back to the country last year from vaults in Paris and New York.

 

Frankfurt is now the largest storage location for the country’s reserves after New York, it said in a statement.

“The transfers are proceeding smoothly. We have succeeded in once again significantly increasing the transport volume compared with 2014. This means that operations are running very much according to schedule,” Carl-Ludwig Thiele, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, said.

The statement is the latest sign of transparency by the central bank after the eurozone sovereign debt crisis in 2012 led to public questions about the safety of the country’s reserves.

 

Most of the country’s gold holdings were built up starting in the 1950s, when trade surpluses were exchanged for gold under the Bretton Woods system that tied the US dollar to the yellow metal. That led to a build-up of gold in vaults overseas, especially in New York under the Federal Reserve.

During the cold war the Bundesbank wanted to keep its gold in the west in case of an invasion from the Soviet Union.

Last year the Bundesbank released a 2,300-page inventory of every single bar it held stored in vaults in Frankfurt, London, Paris and New York.

The Bundesbank aims to store half of its gold reserves in Germany by 2020. Since 2013 it has brought a total of about 366 tonnes of gold to Frankfurt, roughly half of the total to be transferred, it said.