A heart of gold

The sector that stood out to me the most was Germany’s stone industry. Specifically the fact that gold is Germany’s top stone export, caught my eye. In 2020, Gold accounted for 0.58% of Germany’s exports or $9.97B (much higher than I would have ever thought!). Germany’s second highest stone export is platinum at $5.67B, relatively far behind. Other exports categorized under stones include clays, powders, cement, ceramic, glass, silver etc. Germany ships these different materials across the globe to North America, South America, Africa, throughout Europe, and Australia. Precious metals and stones saw a 12% increase in exports from 2015 to 2020. The second highest sector in terms of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) behind oreas, slag, and ash in the minerals industry. Stones have a rating of 0 on the complexity scale and are dead center with most industries being much more complex or much less complex. I wonder how complexity factors into export growth. From the graph it looks like there is not much correlation, very complex and very non complex industries all seem to hover around a CAGR of -10% to 10% from 2015 to 2020.

Upon further research I discovered that Germany is the world’s 2nd largest gold holder (3,381 tons) behind the United States. The US has twice the amount of gold reserves as Germany. Germany’s main export destinations for gold are Switzerland, UK, Austria, Turkey and the Netherlands. Germany is the 13th largest exporter of Gold in the world and Gold was Germany’s 25th highest export in 2020. More ‘digging’ says that Germany got much of its gold reserves from Nazi Germany looting central banks across Europe during WW2. Another source says the Nazi’s stole $600M worth of gold, or about $19B in todays value. Germany was also able to increase their gold reserves post WW2 while they had a trade surplus for many years.