Currency is an instrument of power which the British Empire enjoyed and China dreams of. The United States wants to strengthen the increasingly contested global hegemony of the dollar through cryptocurrencies.
This is a debate that Joachim Nagel, the otherwise far-sighted president of the German central bank, did not see coming. Last April, German politicians, exasperated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive policy, demanded the repatriation of the country’s gold stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
“Representatives of the Bundesbank should go and count the bars and document their checks,” said Markus Ferber, a member of European Parliament from Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.
The suggestion expresses an unprecedented mistrust of the former great ally. The stakes are high: 37% of the country’s 3,351 tons of gold reserves are stored in the United States. This is a legacy of the Bretton Woods system, when the dollar was convertible into gold, but also a safeguard for the Germans in the event of conflict. Bundesbank President Nagel has dismissed his compatriots’ fears. German gold will remain in New York. Even though they are unsettled, Europeans still…
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