What is a treasury?

The treasury that people often refer to usually refers to the national treasury, which is a warehouse that stores specific physical objects, currency and gold.

But in the modern sense, the treasury is no longer just a national treasury. Each country's treasury is often responsible for the custody and management of the country's financial assets and liabilities, as well as a series of national financial functions that reflect the country's budget implementation.

The functions of the treasury have developed from traditional "treasury" management to comprehensive financial management such as controlling internal and external funds in the government budget and managing government cash and debt.

Every country has its own treasury system.

Japan's national treasury is managed by the Ministry of Finance, but most specific operations are entrusted to the central bank, the Bank of Japan.

In 1993, the Russian government promulgated a government order to establish the federal treasury, established the Federal Treasury Administration in the Russian Ministry of Finance, and entrusted the Central Bank with specific management.

The U.S. treasury budget is managed by the Treasury Department, but the Treasury Department mainly manages the use of funds, and the specific custody is performed by the U.S. Treasury Department.

The U.S. Treasury Department is a subordinate unit of the Treasury Department. It is responsible for printing U.S. dollars, minting coins, pouring gold ingots, and keeping these moneys. It is the real "money bag" of the U.S. government.

What do countries have in their national inventories?

The treasury is divided into two categories: financial treasury and property treasury.

Like Russia, all fiscal treasury fund receipts and expenditures are conducted through the treasury accounts established by the Ministry of Finance in the Russian Central Bank and its branches.

The property treasury is the sum of all state-owned assets.

In this sense, the property treasury stores not only precious metals such as gold and silver, but also various fixed assets.

However, because state-owned land, government office buildings, warships, aircraft, etc. do not need to be collected, what really needs to be collected and kept in the treasury are gold, U.S. dollars, and various bonds that are small in size and high in value.

After many personal items confiscated by the government are put into the national treasury, the government will auction them off, because the government does not keep these bits and pieces, but turns them into currency and puts them into the treasury.

For example, New York in the United States specializes in auctioning items confiscated by customs several times a year.

It is common knowledge that the Swiss coffers are filled with gold.

Nowadays, the currency issuance of various countries is no longer linked to the gold stocks in their national treasury, except for Switzerland.

The Swiss treasury always reserves enough gold, so it still maintains the only gold standard in the world.

According to the latest data released by the World Gold Council, the current total gold reserves in the treasury of various countries in the world are 32,946 tons, of which the countries and international organizations with reserves of more than 1,000 tons are the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and the International Monetary Fund.

The Swiss treasury currently has 2,590 tons of gold reserves, accounting for approximately 7.7% of the total gold reserves in the treasury of all countries in the world.

On a per capita basis, Switzerland is the country with the largest amount of gold per capita in the world.

Reed, chief analyst of the precious metals department of UBS, told reporters that in addition to gold, silver and other precious metals and U.S. dollar assets, the Swiss treasury also contains a certain amount of major hard currencies such as euros and pounds and bonds of foreign governments; in addition,

The Swiss National Treasury not only manages huge amounts of real estate assets, but also makes every possible effort to make various financial investments based on the principle of striving to revitalize wealthy funds.

The U.S. Treasury Building in Japan's treasury mainly stores foreign exchange, foreign bonds, gold and other precious metals, as well as the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights and World Bank notes.

According to statistics released by the Japanese Ministry of Finance on January 11, as of the end of December 2004, the foreign exchange reserves in the Japanese treasury were equivalent to US$844.543 billion.

Among them, foreign bonds converted into U.S. dollars amounted to 699.398 billion U.S. dollars; foreign currency cash amounted to 124.866 billion U.S. dollars. Some were deposited in foreign central banks and the Bank for International Settlements, some were deposited in domestic financial institutions in Japan, and some were deposited in foreign financial institutions located in Japan.

branches; in addition, there are special drawing rights from the International Monetary Fund and notes from the World Bank, totaling US$9.503 billion.

There are also gold reserves equivalent to US$10.776 billion.

The Russian treasury contains both monetary gold and other reserves such as foreign exchange, and some gold and foreign exchange reserves are stored abroad.

In the 1950s, the Soviet Union deposited a large amount of foreign exchange earnings in Europe in order to avoid the risk of the U.S. dollar being frozen by the U.S. government when its oil revenue was stored in the United States, forming a large amount of "offshore U.S. dollars" that were out of the control of the U.S. government.

How is the treasury stored? Part of the gold in the Swiss treasury is stored deep underground in the square in front of the Swiss Federal Building and the Federal Parliament Building in Bern.

It is located in a nuclear bomb-proof bunker 100 meters underground.

In addition to this underground vault that has never been open to the public, Switzerland also has many treasury reserves of gold that are open to the public. The purpose is to show off the safety of the reserves and attract more foreign custody customers.

When you walk into any open vault with a security factor of over 100%, you will be amazed by the amount of gold.

Large gold plates weighing more than 1,000 kilograms are piled on the roof, and heavy forklifts and cranes are needed to move them back and forth. The hundreds of square meters of basement are filled with gold marked with a purity of 99.9%.

Those who enter these vaults can look, touch, and buy, but all this is done under the surveillance of escorts and cameras.

The security of the Swiss treasury is among the best in the world.