Lebanon’s central bank counts its gold for first time in at least 30 years
https://ift.tt/UvqcIui
> About 20 per cent of the time-consuming exercise has been completed in the past two years, two senior civil servants told The National.
At this rate they would need about a decade to count it all…
> They have descended into the bank’s vaults several times a week to weigh 12-kilogram gold ingots that are believed to number 13,000 in total. One by one, the metal bars are placed on a scale.
I’m sure you could automate this, or do it in a more efficient way. Like, can’t you just have a room that has some kind of built-in scale in the floor or something? That would give you real time measurements.
> The inventory is limited to checking that the expected amount of gold is present. Audit company KPMG will then step in to evaluate the metal’s worth, the source said
So this is just one part of the job, then they have to trust another company to make sure everything is fine.
> The coins may have additional historical value, but experts The National spoke to have cast doubt on the ingots’ purity.
So after all this massive effort their gold might just be gold coated tungsten…
> The government requested an inventory in March 2020 after it was made aware that another auditor, Deloitte, had been unable to conduct one, said the sources.
What a PITA to just simply know how much money you have…
> “There are rumours that auditors had access to the safe in 1992, but I have no idea because I never got a proper confirmation of this with a certificate showing the number of gold bars,” he said.
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> Mr Shami said on television this week that KPMG did not have the expertise to assist with the gold inventory and would “hire experts”.
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> Asked during a brief phone call to clarify whether the experts would count the gold as well as evaluate its worth, he said: “I have no idea.”
It really doesn’t make much sense to have your reserves in gold. Just reading this article makes you question the usefulness of having large quantities of gold. [Norway figured it out a long time ago](http://globalgoldnews.com/2014/02/11/norway-a-rich-country-without-any-gold-holdings/):
> “Norges Bank has sold the gold bars in the central bank’s gold reserves, with the exception of seven gold bars reserved for exhibition purposes and 3 ½ tons of gold coins that were part of the ‘gold transport’ to England in 1940. Gold is no longer included in Norges Bank’s international reserves.”
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> “The background to the sale is that gold only accounted for just over one per cent of the Bank’s international reserves, and thus contributed little towards diversifying the risk associated with the reserves. The return on gold has historically been low,”
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