There was talk about that on here, a while back. A lot of US stored gold reserves are in the form of bars melted from US Gold coins, when FDR made owning most gold by private citizens illegal. Those bars are 90% pure like the coins were. Not 24 karat and nearly 100% pure. I guess world markets deal mainly in pure gold and ours would require refining to meet it or be discounted accordingly. I would like to know the results of an oipen, honest inventory of all our gold. Even though there are no plans (that I know of) to start trading it, are there?
Why is China supposedly buying so much for their reserves? Thoughts?
The Chinese have been playing currency markets for decades in a fashion very similar to the Japanese during the late 70s into the 80s, using their people's propensity to save as a way of depressing their currency to dump their products to buy market share. It may be that once that game gets old, they're forced to reinforce the currency. Buying gold would do that while getting other "BRICS" countries to buy in as a way of snagging some of the dollar's reserve currency status. For us, reserve currency status has been a way of printing dollars that don't come home to inflate the domestic money supply. BRICS is thus intended to cause a "run away" from the dollar.
IOW, it's financial warfare.