http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/steve-angelo/u-s-exporting-record-amounts-of-gold-overseas In a stunning development over the first seven months of the year, the United States has run up a huge gold deficit as it has exported a record 424 metric tonnes of gold. This is indeed a significant amount when the U.S. exported a total of 488 metric tonnes for the entire year in 2011.
I don't know if this rises to the "stunning" level, or if it is even significant. A lot of folks in Europe and possibly Asia probably want to hold gold given the economic conditions over there. And the US is selling it to them. It helps the trade deficit. Of course, for people who still believe in mercantilism as an economic theory, this is bad news. For everyone else, it can be safely ignored.
But putting it into prespective: 166,000 Metric tons that is 50% more than weight of Nimitz aircraft carrier and some shipping vessels are much bigger than that.
I agree. We are a gold PRODUCING nation, we have gold mines. As such, it should be expected that some nations that don't have gold mines may wish to purchase from us that produce gold. I am sure South Africa has "alarming" rates of gold, platinum, and diamond exports that would just SHOCK this author.
Another perspective. The amount of gold in the OP, is equivalent to about 8.2% of official US gold holdings. (what is supposedly in Ft. Knox) It's not an insignificant amount of this stockpile. A decade of this and most of it is gone. As I said in another post, Americans are quite happy to give away their hard financial assets, so they can move some digital digits around.
I see nothing in the linked OP to show/compare same period data for other years. How do we know it's a "record export" anyway? Guess what? It's not (yet) - the US net export of Gold in 2008 was 567 mt, in 2007 516 mt, etc. Examine for yourself: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/gold/mcs-2012-gold.pdf fwiw, US Gold Production was considerably (~25%) higher in the 1980s and 1990s (~325 nt) compared to this decade (~235 mt) : maybe compare export in those decades, too.
