City of Gold

Gold—the price of which has nearly quadrupled over the past decade—is now being purchased (and hoarded) on such a massive scale that the vaults of New York City have run out of space to store it all in.

[Image: Stackin' it at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City].

The Wall Street Journal reports this week that "fleets of armored trucks piled with gold bars and coins have been streaming out of midtown Manhattan" in a mass movement, perhaps geologically comparable to a landslide, of financialized minerals.

HSBC has apparently "issued an edict that it wanted retail investors to remove their bullion to make space for big institutional customers," The First Post adds, and so "owners of vaults and warehouses across the United States have had to jump to action." However, removing gold from the basements of New York City is "easier said than done," they add—especially as it requires "something approaching a military operation" to get these huge quantities of extraordinarily valuable metal off the island.

The headline sums it up: "Armored trucks leave NYC 'loaded with gold'."

"I have never seen any relocation like this," says the managing director of FideliTrade. Except, of course, in Die Hard with a Vengeance...

[Image: The solid gold walls of the U.S. Bullion Depository at Ft. Knox].

In fact, some massive new gold heist film should now be forced into production, set in the over-securitized labyrinth of vaults beneath a skyscraper in midtown, a kind of post-Italian-Job-remake example of urban super-thievery, complete with glimpses of the complicated overlapping spatial histories of an earlier island geography, from New York's forgotten underground rivers (which our criminals could perhaps scuba-dive through) to inexplicable brick walls (bumped up against where the robbers' maps only show mud). A small baroque pavilion in Central Park could be involved, or perhaps huge rooms of subsurface shelving deep beneath the New York Public Library where CGI-friendly radar equipment could be tested by our future perpetrators.

(Original gold story spotted by Steve Silberman).