The Austrian central bank has successfully repatriated part of it’s gold reserve from the Bank of England and wants to show this to the rest of the world. So they invited the press to visit the central bank and take a look at the freshly delivered goldbars in the vault. Nikolous Jilch from Die Presse was attending this press event and shared a picture with us on twitter.
Breaking: Austrian NB presenting repatriated Gold to journalists. @freegolds @zerohedge @KoosJansen @VictorCleaner pic.twitter.com/Ee7js2k7hf
— Nikolaus Jilch (@JilNik) December 11, 2015
Gold location policy
Earlier this year, the central bank of Austria announced it’s plans to repatriate 110 tonnes of gold, a significant portion of it’s total hoard weighing about 280 tonnes. According to Ewald Nowotny, governor of the Österreichische Nationalbank, the repatriation of gold is part of the new gold location policy of the central bank. The central bank doesn’t only want to bring back precious metal stored in Londen, it also wants to expand the amount of gold held at the Swiss National Bank.
Until recently most of the Austrian gold was stored abroad, which led to a lot of public debate and a desire to bring back at least some of the bars belonging to the Austrians. The illustration below shows the old and new location policy of the Österreichische Nationalbank.
Location of Austrian gold reserves
Global repatriation of gold
When Venezuela decided to repatriate gold from the Bank of England back in 2011 and 2012, it was met with a lot of suspicion and scepticisme. But now it seems he set a new trend by bringing in gold stored abroad. The past couple of years more countries followed the example set by Venezuela, like Ecuador, Germany and the Netherlands. They have already shipped some yellow metal back to their own central bank vaults.
In Belgium and France there has been public discussion about repatriating gold, while the people in Switzerland started a referendum forcing the central bank to bring back all the gold reserves held abroad.
It is quite remarkable that the Austrian central bank invites the press to take a look at the newly arrived gold bars. What kind of message do they want to sent to the rest of the world?
Update: Austria doesn’t store gold at the Bundesbank, as we mentioned previously on Marketupdate.
