Swiss Gold Repatriation Almost Reality

A year ago, 4 Swiss parliament members launched the "Swiss Gold Initiative" to repatriate their gold to Switzerland. Today, almost one year later we have 90000 supporters for this initiative. Once the 100000 supporters is reached, we are certain that the Swiss National Bank will repatriate their gold holdings. I'm sure those 10000 votes will be reached by March 2013.

So not only the Germans want their 3400 tonnes of gold back, now the Swiss want their gold back.

As of September 2012, the SNB had 55591 million CHF gold (Table 1). That's 59139 million USD gold or 33.4 million ounces of gold or 1040 tonnes of gold. That's one third of Germany's gold and is pretty significant.

The SNB hasn't said where its gold is and also hasn't said if it will repatriate their gold all at once, but if they were to repatriate it all at once, it would be almost double the amount that Germany is now repatriating over 7 years: namely 674 tonnes of gold.

Table 1: Swiss National Bank Balance Sheet

Other countries who want their gold back are: Ecuador (26 tonnes), The Netherlands (613 tonnes)

Disclosure: I am long AGQ.