Gold: it’s not just for money anymore. Actually, it’s not much about money anymore! Yes, people always watch the gold price, but that’s more about gold as a commodity subject to price speculation. And gold remains a central bank reserve asset into which such national authorities can dip when they want to intervene in the currency markets – again, by selling their gold-as-commodity in order to gain supplies of the currency they want to strengthen – but they will sooner do that using reserves of other foreign currencies they have accumulated.

This is a far cry from those long-ago days of the gold standard, when the value of a nation’s currency was determined by the precise amount of actual gold it claimed to represent, so that balance of payments surplusses and deficits were settled by transfers of gold from one central bank to another. There was a dirty little secret there, however: it was rare that the gold was actually physically transferred when settling such national accounts. It’s heavy stuff, after all, and thus costly to ship, especially when you factor in the extra need for security. Plus, you could never rule out the trade winds reversing next year – so to speak – so that deficit country became surplus country and the gold would then have to be shipped back the other way.

No, it was much easier just to slap a new ownership-label on a certain section of a pile of gold sitting safely and cozily in some certifiably safe place – the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve, say, or a similar place in London, which has long been the center of the world’s gold market anyway and the source of the daily gold fixing that sets its price.

However, that may not be good enough anymore:

This brief piece from Germany’s Huffington Post reports how the Bundesbank’s official in charge of transatlantic relations, Philipp Mißfelder, has demanded that all of his institution’s gold be shipped back to German physical control by the year 2020. Apparently, that has already occurred with the German gold that used to be held in Paris – note how we’re only allowed to find out about this after it already happened – and now Mißfelder is demanding a repatriation of the 674 tons of Germany’s gold in New York and London.

One has to wonder: Why this? Why now? Granted, it’s always a better feeling to have a valuable asset like that – even if less important than it was before – under your own lock-and-key, unseizable by others barring invasion, yet, again, the trouble and costs involved in that physical transportation are such that things were run up to this point in such a way as to avoid them entirely. It’s true that Germany itself is a bit safer of a place, now that it is not divided in two anymore with Warsaw Pact armies massed just on the other side of the inter-German border, but then that has been the case for over twenty years.

What it comes down to is Trust, right? And what sort of recent cellphone-listening, snooping-on-citizens* developments have we seen lately to throw Trust into question?

* Recall that this has involved both the US and the UK, the former operating from the privileged position of its embassy, allotted by the Berlin authorities upon reunification a high-status location right beside the Reichstag.

Here at €S we greeted the oncoming prospect of the London 2012 Olympic Games with an examination of whether it really makes sense economically for a city to host them, which came to the daring conclusion: “It depends.” Now they are over – do we have any preliminary verdict?

Well, there is one from Michel de Poncins of the French on-line commentary site Contretemps, and it is grim:

Les JO de Londres : vers la ruine ? La cérémonie de clôture des JO de Londres a mis dimanche un terme aux fest… http://t.co/OeA9SNfA

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Contrepoints

Vers la ruine? – “towards ruin?” De Poncins asks, and his lede is no more cheery:

The closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games on Sunday put an end to the festivities. Now it’s the hour of drawing up the balance. Were these Games once more a financial catastrophe?

After all, let’s remember that Montréal was still paying for staging the 1976 Summer Games some thirty years later, while the 2004 Games undoubtedly accelerated Greece’s slide into sovereign bankruptcy.

So what about London? First of all, there is Games’ official price-tag: €11 billion. That in itself, claims De Poncins, came in at four times what it originally was supposed to cost. In a sense, though, that doesn’t really matter – because even that €11 billion hardly covers the true cost, which is not really calculable but must be supplemented by “an unknown quantity of adjacent expenses.” Besides, ordinary tourist traffic for the hotels was noticeably lower in London during the Games, and a price must also be added for all the inconvenience they caused to simply getting around the city, during the Games themselves but also during all the construction leading up to them.

Clearly, what we have here is what you could term an “Olympics Scrooge”: De Poncin’s focus is solely on the money-costs, whose extent he claims is unknowable, even while he ignores the less tangible but still potentially substantial benefits that can be accrued from the Olympics of boosting a given city’s image. As we saw in our previous treatment, that certainly was the case for Barcelona in 1992 and even for Munich in 1972 to some degree, despite the massacre of the Israeli athletes. There’s no reason to think a similar effect was missing here; the Games themselves seemed to have been run very well, and press accounts describe even a sort of euphoria eventually taking hold among Londoners over what was going on.

So this isn’t meant to be your most-unbiased accounting of whether the 2012 Games gave to London more than they demanded. Indeed, M. de Poncin has a particular axe to grind: He focuses on costs because he is against governmental spending on the Olympics – or on sport in general – in any form! Olympics lead to unemployment, don’t you know: the greater government spending involved must be supported by higher taxes, which depress the economy, throwing people out of work, etc.

That’s where they are coming from on this Contretemps site. And you can tell, because they now have a second article up on the London Olympics – “A celebration of the virtues of competition.” Lede:

The economy functions in the same way as an Olympic competition. Rivalry tends to make everyone better. And no enterprise or no country can maintain an advantage indefinitely.

Hooray! The London 2012 Olympic Games formally open today! Although of course some athletes have already been in action even from Wednesday, mainly the football players.

Let me repeat, though, that this blog is generally not interested, certainly not in the athletics. Attention is more likely to be attracted here by catchy and notable Olympic-related headlines – All of London sells itself to sponsors, is a good example.

That’s the title of the kick-off report for a series that the German journalist Imke Henkel (a female, FYI; her winsome smile you can inspect at the article’s very top if you click through) is undertaking for the German newsmagazine Focus, by heading to London to write an “Olympic Diary.” This first installment is all about the sponsorship madness that seems to have descended upon the city.

Or perhaps even – although naturally the term is grossly over-used – the sponsorship fascism. You might have already heard about that Cafe Olympic – located within sight of the new Olympic Stadium, actually – that has been forced to rename itself “Cafe Lympic” for the duration of the Games. That ain’t the half of it, though; Henkel actually provides a list of words that businesses are henceforth (through 12 August) not allowed to display, which go beyond any variation of the word “Olympic” to include “Summer,” “2012,” and of course “Gold,” “Silver” and “Bronze.” Lilagekleidete Aufpasser – translates as “Purple-clad monitors” – are even now roaming the streets, in London but also all over the UK, ensuring that any violations are reported for prompt sanction by LOCOG, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. (more…)

As everyone knows by now, the 2012 London Olympics open in just two days’ time. This blog is not so very interested, at least from an athletics point-of-view, although perhaps noteworthy incidents might still arise.

Meanwhile, Christian Hönicke from the German business newspaper Handelsblatt approaches the Games from a proper business perspective to expound on How metropolises profit from the Olympics. Yes, the medals-won table is already there over on the right side (all zeros for now, of course; “Afghanistan,” “Albania,” and right on through) and Hönicke’s piece is regularly interrupted by mini-accounts of past medal-winners, but the text itself provides a good treatment of the question: “Is it worth it for a city to host the Games?” (more…)

The World Anti-Doping Agency just yesterday added to the list it maintains of countries who do not comply with its guidelines . . . wait for it . . . Great Britain, which as we all know is no less than the host for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games! This word comes from an article in today’s De Morgen, a Flemish newspaper.

Now, at this point the report cannot be confirmed at source, namely at the WADA’s website. Yes, they do post the news there that the organization presented its “Compliance Report” to something called its “Foundation Board” yesterday (working on a Sunday; hmm . . .), at which point it also had its 2012 budget confirmed (frozen from 2011, apparently). But I could not find that Compliance Report available anywhere on that same website; it certainly is not on their “Publications” webpage, and there’s also no mention of who is now on the compliance blacklist and who is not on another page about something called the “Code Compliance Assessment Survey.”

The really remarkable aspect of this report – if true – is why the UK is now being put on this WADA blacklist – joining about fifty other lands – in the first place. It’s not that they have suddenly started to coddle athletes who cheat. Quite the contrary: the British Olympic Committee has voted to ban any athlete caught doping from competitions that it stages for life. In this it took up an idea from the International Olympic Committee – which the latter, however, never implemented after complaints from the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The British Committee, however, did; this ban is now in effect in competitions under its jurisdiction for anyone caught doping. But banning-for-life does not conform to WADA standards – as with the Court of Arbitration, it is too strict! So the British go on the blacklist; the article mentions that they could even lose their awarding of next year’s Olympic Games! Surely that latter prospect is purely theoretical, but WADA Chairman John Fahey still remarked for the press:

It’s a shame that things have had to come so far. To the Court of Arbitration’s decision we reacted in a correct manner and asked the British to review their viewpoint, but they refuse all discussion. It’s not for me to decide what must happen now. There are quite a few countries on the list and we will assist them all to come back into conformity.

Mark Espiner is a writer for the Guardian as well as a playwrite/director. He has had a new gig since last autumn, though, writing for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Obviously, comparison between the two great European capitals which that new position causes him to move between (by which I mean Berlin and London, where the Guardian is headquartered) is what his columns are expected to be about and, as a writer on the dramatic arts, it’s only natural that he has devoted most of his attention to cultural issues.

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

Did you know that Barack Obama’s first visit to Europe as US President actually begins tonight? I didn’t know that, but that’s only one of the interesting facts you can pick up (if you read Dutch) from Frank Poosen’s preview of the president’s visit published today in the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad (The Obamas tear through Europe).

Yes, the US first couple (and the rest of their 500-person entourage) fly into London’s Stansted airport (misspelled in the article) sometime tonight, to be then helicoptered promptly to their hotel in London proper. Poosen adds that up to six helicopters will be taking off from Stansted at roughly the same time, each heading to London by a slightly-different route – it’s a helicopter shell-game designed to befuddle any terrorist stationed just outside the airport with an anti-aircraft missile, you see. (more…)