[sb057]

FWIW, the costs for transporting gold bullion are marginal. A fully-laden Boeing 747-400F cargo plane can carry 396,900 kg, or 12,760,000 troy ounces. At the current price of $1,936/ozt, that's over $24 billion in value transported for perhaps 0.1% overhead. These are perfectly reasonable sums to be expected in the realm of nation-state debt settlement.

[kurthr]

I agree those costs may not seem that high, and I think the transport costs in that case would be dominated by security. Daily BIS is ~$6T, and I'm not sure how much net would need to be transported, but even $1B/day in costs starts to seem significant.

The problem is that even smaller quantities of $100M or $100k would have larger relative overheads. Once you're down to $1000 or toz size quantities where security is less of an issue, the testing and weighing costs become significant.