An ethical person - like a politician, banker or lawyer - may know right from wrong, but unlike many of them, a moral person lives it. An Americanist first already knows that.
Bankers and their government agents will always act in their own best interests. Any residual benefit flowing down to the citizens by happenstance will just be litter.
What do Switzerland, England, Austria, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Mexico, Poland, Italy. Australia, Ecuador, Romania and the tiny country of Azerbaijan have in common? They all want to know where their gold is, and they all have burgeoning gold repatriation movements in various stages of progress. Peter Boehringer, the father of the gold repatriation movement in Germany, and founder of the website Goldseiten.de joins us to discuss the great global awakening as nations begin asking, where is our PHYSICAL gold? We want it back!
Late last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had begun investigations of 10 major banks over the process of setting prices for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in the London market.
Look for the end result to pretty much be a cover-up of the suppression of gold and silver prices. – Pat Heller
The banks under scrutiny are Bank of Nova Scotia, Barclays PLC, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Societe Generale SA, Standard Bank Group Ltd., and UBS AG. After this announcement, the Swiss competition commission, WEKO, said it was looking into possible manipulation by Swiss banks in the precious metals markets.
As reported in the Journal, the Department of Justice is looking into criminal activity, while the CFTC has opened a civil investigation.
Many researchers have written about the extensive history of central banks manipulating gold prices over the decades. In the United States, for instance, declassified government documents released so far have all confirmed that the federal government has conspired with other governments and major banks to manipulate gold prices right from the 1930s up into the 1980s.
Historically, many government monetary systems were valued in relation to gold, so it should not surprise anyone that governments would try to influence the relative prices. In the United States, for instance, the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) was established as a provision of the January 31, 1934 Gold Reserve Act. The ESF was explicitly authorized to use its funds to stabilize the exchange value of the dollar versus gold. Changes over the years have never revoked the authority to manipulate gold prices. In fact, a law enacted in 1970 directed the Secretary of the Treasury, with the approval of the President, to “deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities.”
These new investigations follow similar reviews in Europe. Last year, the British government fined Barclays Bank more than $40 million for one incident of gold price manipulation. Also, the Swiss regulator, FINMA, said it found “serious misconduct” among precious metals traders at UBS involving a silver-fix order of one client.
If you think that the researchers and writers claiming that central banks and major private banks were manipulating the precious metals markets by suppressing prices are finally going to be proven right, think again.
I am confident that the end result of the U.S. government investigations will be, after several years in the works, some fines collected from many of these banks for specific individual incidents. Further, there will be promises that whatever wrongdoing they had done will no longer occur. And that will be all that happens.
Why do I think this is what will be the end result of such a bombshell development? The answer is simple. Ask yourself why the DOJ and CFTC are investigating trading in the London markets but not in the New York COMEX markets. While it is true that the London market handles more volume of precious metals trading than the COMEX, the U.S. markets are more relevant to Americans.
Also ask yourself why the investigations involve eight foreign owned banks and only two U.S. companies. The foreign banks would only be within the purview of American regulators if their actions in the London markets were perpetrated from the U.S.-based offices. Why aren’t other U.S. banks being investigated?
The reason these investigations will be pretty much whitewashed is that the Department of Justice is unwilling to go after Wall Street. New York Federal Reserve Bank president William C. Dudley (who worked at Goldman Sachs 1986-2007 as the chief U.S. economist, a partner, and as a managing director) confirmed not that long ago that the DOJ has no ongoing investigations of Wall Street firms. The DOJ is not conducting such investigations despite former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan’s public claim that there were massive illegal and criminal frauds committed by Wall Street firms.
The DOJ consistently stated that it will not prosecute these large institutions because the risk of damage to the economy, as they were told by outside experts. However, could this DOJ policy could have more to do with the revolving doors where the DOJ and CFTC investigators largely have worked for the above named banks or hope to do so when the leave government employment?
After all, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced two years ago that no investigation of UBS’s fixing of LIBOR interest rates would be done. Holder claimed in a news conference that the lack of prosecution was based on a decision of how such an investigation would impact global financial markets. But, was the real reason that UBS was a client of the law firm where Holder worked before his current job?
In a previous decision not to investigate HSBC, a Congressional panel asked for the identity of outside parties who advised the DOJ to drop the investigation for global financial stability reasons. Eventually, Justice officials had to admit that they did not consult any outside parties before canceling the HSBC review.
In sum, I expect the public to be lulled into thinking that the U.S. government is really finding and reporting the truth about the manipulation of precious metals prices. However, once you realize that the DOJ and CFTC are investigating the wrong market (London instead of the New York COMEX), not all of the appropriate American-based banks that should be investigated are being pursued because the government agencies have a “policy” to avoid investigations of firms where they used to work or hope to later be employed. Don’t expect any definitive revelations about the depth and breadth of the manipulation of precious metals trading in America.
Instead, look for the end result to pretty much be a cover-up of the suppression of gold and silver prices.
Dec 4, 2014 ... Who's who in Ukraine's new neo-Nazi, fascist government ... Was The Price Of
Ukraine's "Liberation" The Handover Of Its Gold To The Fed?
Aug 11, 2014 ... The Ukraine's gold reserves weigh in at 42.3 tonnes, and are worth 1.3 billion
Euros. A leading figure of the former ministry of finance has ...
As Ukraine's socio-economic situation goes from wost to worst-er, today's announcement by President Poroshenko that the government will take actions to stabilize the currency (which as we previously noted, appears to be heading for hyperinflation) has Ukrainians rushing for the exits into precious metals... with only one goal in mind - wealth preservation.
Furthermore, according to RIA, on Tuesday, Ukrainian television channel Ukraina announced that with the new exchange rate, the minimum wage in Ukraine stands at around $42.90 per month, which according to the channel, is lower than in Ghana or Zambia.
There are currently no plans to raise the minimum wage until December.
Behold hyperinflation:
"Food prices among producers rose 57.1 percent, with the price for grains and vegetables rising 91 percent from January 2014 to January 2015, while the official inflation rate over the period totaled 28.5 percent.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian consumers responded to economic difficulties by cutting their spending in hryvnias by 22.6 percent, which amounts to an almost 40 percent decrease in real consumption."
Nothing to fear though: we are sure all that hard-earned US taxpayer-lent money will be safe and sound.
D. Strauss-Kahn and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
Pssst!Did you know?In hardly any other area of life so many conspiracy theories circulating in the economy.SPIEGEL ONLINE presents the key.This time: How President Nixon verscherbelte the U.S. gold reserves from Fort Knox.
Tell yourself it’s not evident that the world’s mainstream media is not duplicitous in this cover-up. Where are there any other “investigative journalists” and/or financial “trustees” with the spine to step forward as a whistleblower. Not even one soul among a million with a fibre of honor and self-respect. Are we so embedded with cowards who can only smear and ridicule the truth as treason when it’s brought forth by independent competitors? It’s become clear to all why an immoral people being creators of a dishonest money must be shielded, and the truth not be told.
mounting crises faced by the One Bank in its own paper-bullion markets.
Invariably, these “crises” are 100% self-created. This is easily illustrated by reviewing a few of its current (increasingly serious) problems.
1) No one has seen the 10,000+ tons of gold which the U.S. government claims to have been storing (on behalf of itself, and other nations) for roughly 60 years.
2) The reason why no one has seen this gold is that most of it does not exist, and of the small fraction that remains, any audit would reveal that every bar had been pledged to numerous (dozens of?) owners.
3) Those owners are now “requesting” (demanding?) that their gold be returned to them.
Why does the U.S. government (and its Big Banks) no longer hold all the gold that it used to hold – and still pretends to hold? The short answer is that the One Bank is a clan of psychopaths, which chooses to employ psychopaths as most of its senior henchmen.
The somewhat longer answer is that one of this crime syndicate’s most important strategies in operating the massive paper-currency fraud it has been running for the past 44 years is the suppression of gold/silver prices.
Gold and silver are the monetary “canary in the coal mine” which would (normally) alert the world to paper-frauds of this nature/magnitude.
The “modus operandi” of all psychopaths in performing most tasks is overkill. All that the banksters needed to do in this operation was to dribble-out a few hundred tons of gold per year onto the market. In conjunction with their endemic market manipulations; that would have been sufficient to keep prices under control – and they could buy back what they dumped onto the market out of annual mine supply, thus maintaining this operation in perpetuity.
Instead, being psychopaths; the One Bank and its minions chose to crush the precious metals sector. More than 90% of the mining companies were driven into bankruptcy, minimizing annual supply. Compounding this, excessive price-suppression of gold and silver meant that both metals were perpetually “on sale”, stoking (if not maximizing) demand.
The One Bank took a sector which was in balance (the natural state of all markets/sectors), and created a massive, permanent, structural supply-deficit. Thus not only were the banksters dumping excessive amounts of their bullion (gold) stockpiles each year to maintain their excessive level of price-suppression, they were forced to expend large, additional quantities of those stockpiles simply to meet the excess demand which was created by their (psychopathic) overkill.
To attempt to mask this massive, self-created bullion crisis (rather than simply curb their own psychopathic behavior); the banksters initiated numerous other, massive frauds in the precious metals sector. These include their sham “leasing”, “hedging”, fraudulent accounting of inventories, and their ultra-absurd“leveraging” of the entire paper-called-gold and paper-called-silver markets – at some extreme ratio in excess of 100:1.
As with most of the One Bank’s self-created economic “crises”; its preferred method of dealing with this problem has been to pretend it didn’t exist. But (as the banksters are now discovering) such self-delusion does not suffice when the nations who believe that the U.S. government is storing gold on their behalf ask that this “gold” be returned to them.
First it was Germany, and then it was Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, and France. All of these nations have either made formal requests or statements of intention that they want their gold. It was the first (and most-public) of these “gold repatriations” which exposed the obvious fact that the gold supposedly stored in the U.S. wasn’t there.
To begin with; Germany only requested a small fraction of its gold. Secondly, the “repatriation” was spread-out over a ridiculously long period – seven years – when (as we later found out) the entire process could have been conducted in a matter of weeks.
Finally, as detailed at Zero Hedge; the U.S. had beenunable to comply with even these feeble/minimal deliveries.
Then we had the strange case of the Netherland’s “successful” repatriation effort. What made it “strange”? Primarily, it was the fact that it was done in secret. What was also strange (given Germany’s prior failure) is that the Netherlands got all its gold (more or less) in ‘one gulp’, in a process which – we are told – took only a few weeks.
Despite the cloak-and-dagger nature of this gold “operation”; most were inclined to accept this “secret gold repatriation” at face value. The reason for this is that it was considered quid pro quo: a reward for the complicity of the Netherlands government in the “MH-17” cover-up. However, suddenly, we must now question whether this entire episode was simply more of the One Bank’s disinformation.
What has changed here – suddenly – is the “breaking news” (also covered at Zero Hedge) that now, supposedly, Germany’s government has been able to secretly, successfully “repatriate” a large quantity of its own gold, the same gold which it was totally unable to obtain via an open, public process.
Here it is important to step back, briefly, for some historical context. Why were all these thousands of tons of Europe’s gold ferried across the Atlantic to the United States, in the first place? Two reasons. First of all; it was done on the eve of the Second World War, when Hitler’s rapacious intentions were already obvious.
The second reason it was considered imperative to move Europe’s gold to the U.S. (where Hitler couldn’t loot it) was because at that time the world was still on a gold standard, making gold a primary strategic asset. For these reasons; the transfers of gold to the U.S. were conducted with the utmost secrecy.
But flash ahead 75 years, and the world is a dramatically different place. There is no “Third Reich”, or other foreign menace threatening Europe, which is one reason why these nations are now asking that their gold be returned. Equally important, the world has not been on a gold standard for more than 40 years.
Not only is gold no longer a primary strategic asset (at least at the moment), but officially (according to the banksters) it is a mere “barbarous relic”. Putting these obvious points together, we arrive at a simple conclusion: there cannot be any possible legitimate reason to engage in these “gold repatriations” in secret.
Conversely, there is one gigantic, obvious motive for why the One Bank would instruct its puppet governments to “repatriate” Europe’s gold “secretly”. What is the only, possible way to “repatriate” gold which doesn’t exist? Do it “secretly”. Here we need merely reference the 60-year farce inside the U.S., where no one has seen the gold since the 1950’s, yet officially no one questions its legitimacy (let alone its existence).
Compounding the absurdity of this new gold-scam; we’re now told that the “gold transfers” to Germany are not only also “secret”, but retroactive. As recently as Christmas of last year; “officially” we were told that virtually none of Germany’s gold stored in the U.S. had been returned to it.
But flash-ahead a mere six weeks; and now we’re supposed to believe that all during the months we wereofficially told that virtually no gold was being shipped to Germany at all, that shipments were regularly taking place – “in secret”. Could not have happened.
As also documented by Zero Hedge; again and again over the past 6 months, various German officials have assured Germans that their U.S.-stored gold was “totally safe”, and thus it wasn’t necessary to repatriate it. This additional layer of lies would have been entirely unnecessary if the gold was actually (secretly) being shipped back to Germany, and would accomplish nothing — except to make those officials look foolish, in hindsight.
Conversely, “assuring” Germans (again and again and again) that their U.S. gold was “safe” is/was precisely what we would expect these stooges to say and do if there was simply no gold to transfer. Now, if all of Europe’s mythical gold is “secretly” shipped back to the vaults of its own (corrupt) banks, then – so the banksters hope – it can mythically exist in their vaults (with no one ever allowed to see it), for the next 60 years or so. Problem solved.
Of course if it took one, intrepid writer only about thirty seconds to see through the One Bank’s latest gold-scam, chances are that this sham won’t fool very many people, for very long. There can be no possible, legitimate reason to do any of this (supposed) gold repatriation in secret. Not only is there no positive reason to do this, there is an obvious reason not to do so: expense.
Doing anything “secretly” means doing it more expensively, starting with the additional “security costs” necessary to maintain the secrecy. If the U.S. government was a prosperous nation, wallowing in a large budget surplus; one could understand such ostentatious secrecy.
However, as the world’s ultimate Deadbeat Debtor, which has had to (literally) resort to counterfeiting its own currency – by the $trillions – merely to stave-off its own bankruptcy; clearly it would need to conduct any trans-Atlantic gold repatriation via economy class.
Of course with the U.S. government actually “shipping” nothing (other than more lies), it can afford to go first-class, all the way.
Das Gold ist alles vorbei sie Dang Fool! Aber, wissen Sie, dass. Sie sind einfach nur als wüßte es ist sicher mit der NY Fed. Sie liegen für das deutsche Volk. It's gone, Zugsystem lahm gelegt. Die Rothschild Banken haben es und sie werden nie wieder von ihr in unserer Lebenszeit. Mit ihr Leben. Sie hat dich reingelegt vom gleichen Fürsten, die über Jahrhunderte hinweg haben sie die Kriege führen, umfassendes selbst während sie fliehen mit ihrem Gold die ihm zugrunde liegende, schulden. Weiter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Where Is Mein Gold?
Almost half of Germany’s gold is stored in vaults under the streets of Manhattan. Or is it?
Peter Boehringer hates the word “conspiracy.” It implies something
crazy, and if you spend even a little time with the 45-year-old German,
it becomes clear he’s driven by a desire for order. On a recent morning
in Munich, he’s dressed in a cobalt blue shirt that matches his blue tie
and blue eyes. His black hair is cropped close above his receded
hairline. In his gray Volkswagen minivan, the cup holder contains two
identical water bottles, each filled to the same level. At the end of a
daylong interview, for which Boehringer has arranged an hour-by-hour
itinerary, he sends a follow-up e-mail with a numbered summation of
points he’s made. No. 2 says that the crusade he’s been waging for the
last three years is simply about transparency. “Questions,” he writes,
“by definition cannot be ‘conspiracy theories.’ ”
Boehringer is a gold bug, a member of the impassioned tribe of
investors and academics who distrust central banks and paper money,
unless the governments that print it will exchange the cash for gold or
silver from their vaults. He has an asset management firm that invests
his own money and that of clients in gold, silver, and mining stocks,
and he’s a founder of the nonprofit German Precious Metal Society, which
educates the public about “the craziness of unbacked monetary systems,”
he says. In short, Boehringer is worried that the global economy is
built on a fiction of currencies that aren’t backed by precious metals.
Which is why he set out to make sure the gold that Germany and other
nations say they have actually exists.
Almost half of Germany’s gold resides at 33 Liberty St., the
headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 80 feet below
street level in a vault that sits on Manhattan’s bedrock. In 2012,
Boehringer started a campaign on his blog to bring it home. He argued
the gold should be shipped to the German central bank in Frankfurt. The
hoard, amassed during Germany’s postwar boom, had never been subject to a
published bar-by-bar physical review by its owners.
That lack of accounting had become an insatiable itch for Boehringer.
As the volunteer chairman of a private storage company for silver and
gold investors based in Gerstetten, Germany, Boehringer personally
counts the holdings each year by lugging metal valued at some €140
million ($161 million) from one end of the vault to the other, just to
make sure it’s all there. His blog became a hub for precious-metal fans.
As gold prices peaked in 2011, the Taxpayers Association of Europe
asked him to draft a letter to the Deutsche Bundesbank seeking to know
precisely where the central bank’s gold was. He eagerly agreed to help
the group, which advocates for lower taxes and serves as an umbrella for
29 national associations across the continent. After receiving a
response that wasn’t detailed enough to satisfy him, Boehringer pressed
on, starting the “Repatriate Our Gold” campaign in February 2012. He
conceded it had low odds of success. Gold bugs largely inhabit the
fringes of finance, and some of their apocalyptic arguments for
investing had begun to show cracks as gold prices slid. Opponents
including bankers and journalists branded Boehringer a conspiracy
theorist for even suggesting something was amiss at the core of global
finance. Then the seemingly impossible happened: He started to win.
Photographer: Ulricht Baumgarten/Getty Images
Because it doesn’t react with air or water, gold always glitters,
even in shipwrecks lost for centuries. It’s so dense—19.3 times heavier
than water—that when you lift an ingot, the disconnect between what
your eyes see and your hands feel produces an odd sensation, as if
you’re on a planet with a stronger gravitational pull. A standard
central bank gold bar is a bit smaller than two soda cans stuck together
end-to-end but weighs about 27 pounds, the combined heft of four
newborn babies.
Less than 175,000 metric tons (386 million pounds) of gold have been
mined in all human history, according to the World Gold Council. Melt it
all down—King Tutankhamun’s death mask, the bars in Fort Knox, your
wedding ring—and it would form a cube 21 meters on each side, reaching
just one eighth the height of the Washington Monument. A 1-kilogram gold
bar is the size of a flip phone and could buy a BMW.
Gold also has a deeper appeal. When stocks and bonds are plummeting
on paper, gold is reassuringly physical. Speaking in October at the
Council on Foreign Relations, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan said gold is so universally treated like money itself, it’s as
if it’s “inbred into human beings.” The fact that gold can be touched
means, of course, that it can also disappear.
Boehringer cites an anecdote from almost a century ago to argue that
Germany has failed to zealously protect its gold holdings. In the 1920s
the president of the German central bank, Hjalmar Schacht, paid a visit
to the New York Fed and its founding president, Benjamin Strong. In an
episode recounted in his 1955 autobiography, Schacht wrote, “Strong was
proud to be able to show us the vaults which were situated in the
deepest cellar of the building and remarked: ‘Now, Herr Schacht, you
shall see where the Reichsbank gold is kept.’ ”
The two bankers waited as New York Fed staff sought the German stash.
“At length we were told: ‘Mr. Strong, we can’t find the Reichsbank
gold.’ ” Schacht comforted the flabbergasted Fed banker: “Never mind; I
believe you when you say the gold is there. Even if it weren’t you are
good for its replacement.” The men left without the German seeing his
bars, instead accepting their existence as a matter of trust.
Assuming the German gold actually was somewhere at 33 Liberty St. at
the time, it’s probably now long gone. The period between the World Wars
was plagued by runaway inflation in which Germans legendarily shopped
with wheelbarrows of cash and burned bundles of reichsmarks for warmth.
(Among the inflation causes, Germany had stopped backing its currency
with gold during World War I.) Adolf Hitler exploited the economic
meltdown to seize power and then drained Germany’s gold holdings,
including assets he stole from Jews, to pay for World War II.
After the war, global trade revolved around the U.S. dollar, which
was backed by gold. Under the arrangement, any nation could cash in its
greenbacks for ingots at any time. As West Germany’s economy took off,
the nation ran a trade surplus during the 1950s and ’60s. German
companies exchanged their dollars for deutsche marks, filling the new
Deutsche Bundesbank with U.S. currency. The central bank, in turn,
switched the dollars for gold at the New York Fed, swelling its stores
under Liberty Street. That ended in 1971 when President Richard Nixon
suspended gold conversions, making the dollar a “fiat currency,” backed
by nothing but the public’s confidence in the U.S. During the Cold War,
it made sense to keep the gold in Manhattan rather than Frankfurt, 75
miles from the Iron Curtain, just in case the Soviets invaded. Yet even
after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the gold remained in New York. Or so
the Germans have been told.
Boehringer in Munich.
Photographer: Ramon Haindl for
Bloomberg Businessweek
The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s left
Boehringer, who’d done tech investing, without a job and with time on
his hands. After a life ticking the boxes of conventional
success—growing up middle class near Stuttgart, earning dual degrees in
information technology and business, working as a management consultant
for Booz & Co. and a private equity group—he got to thinking for the
first time about how the global economy works.
“Some things didn’t add up,” he says, especially the trust-based
monetary system. “I saw how destructive paper money could become.”
Concluding that precious metals were a reliable store of wealth, he
became a gold evangelist, blogging and starting his money-management
business in 2003. Three years later he founded the German Precious Metal
Society, which organizes conferences and speeches on topics such as
gold price manipulation and trends in gold demand in Asia. It was
through his activism that the Taxpayers Association of Europe found
Boehringer, and they started their campaign.
The first breakthrough occurred in September 2012, when Germany’s
Audit Court followed Boehringer with its own, similar demands. The
court, which is a branch of the federal government that examines federal
financial management, asked the Bundesbank to say how much gold it had
and where it was located and to physically inspect the bars, saying
their existence had never been verified.
The Bundesbank responded a month later, revealing that at the end of
2011 it had 271,265 bars weighing 3,396 tons—today worth about $140
billion. They were stored in Frankfurt and at the New York Fed, the Bank
of England in London, and the Bank of France in Paris. “Every year,
these central banks provide the Bundesbank with confirmation of its
holdings of gold,” the German bank said. “The integrity, reputation, and
security of these foreign depositories are beyond reproach.
… There is
no possibility of confusion or commingling with the holdings of other
parties.” The single biggest slice of the German reserves, at 45
percent, was in Lower Manhattan: 122,597 bars weighing about 1,536 tons,
dwarfing the 1,036 tons held in Germany itself.
But the Bundesbank said the physical inventory requested by the audit
court didn’t conform to common practice among central banks—that is,
one does not just show up at the New York Fed and start counting gold
bars.
The Bundesbank told the German parliament it was in talks to gain
access and that the New York Fed was receptive, as long as its own
security and logistical constraints were taken into account. Bundesbank
executive board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele, who testified to the
parliament’s budget committee, added, “We’re in negotiations with our
partner central banks to develop auditing rights.”
Boehringer, the disclosure that it would take negotiations to
access the gold felt like proof he was on the right track. The limited
transparency he’d won had made plain that Germany didn’t necessarily
have the right to thoroughly examine the single largest stash of its own
gold. “Central banks live from their trust,” he says. “Our campaign has
the ability to put that trust in question.”
In October 2012, as part of a compromise with the audit court, the
Bundesbank said it would start bringing home some of the reserves. At
first, the bank said it would move 150 tons of gold, valued at about
$8.4 billion at the time, from New York to its own vaults, dividing the
shipments evenly over three years. “It was a huge success for us,”
Boehringer says. “I would never have believed that.” The German central
bank later expanded its repatriation plan to 300 tons from New York to
Frankfurt by 2020.
Boehringer had to wait until Christmas Eve 2013 to see if the
Bundesbank was making good on the pledge. That day, the central bank
announced the first-year tally in the tabloid Bild under a
front-page headline, “Today Only Good News.” “At last! The Bundesbank
gets its gold treasure back,” the story said. The amounts, however, were
underwhelming. Although 32 tons came from the Bank of France, just 5
tons came from New York—a tenth of the original plan of 50 tons a year
from the New York Fed.
“Why so little material?” Boehringer recalls wondering. “Something
smelled fishy.”
The article quoted Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann
saying the repatriation had been “a huge logistical challenge.” Yet one
ton of gold, formed into a cube, is just larger than a plastic milk
crate. Five tons of gold bars can fit into the back of a pickup truck,
assuming the truck’s suspension can handle the weight.
“The organisational preparations were very time-consuming since the
required agreements and contracts are voluminous and detailed,” the
Bundesbank’s Thiele said in a statement four weeks later. Additionally,
some bars in New York had to be melted and recast. To Boehringer, the
recasting was the ultimate red flag. It meant any trace of original
serial numbers had been wiped out. “Their untouched existence since the
1960s is no longer provable,” Boehringer says.
The Bundesbank explained that it recast the bars because they hadn’t
met the “London good delivery” standard. Such gold is at least 99.5
percent pure and comes in bars of roughly 400 troy ounces, or 12.44
kilograms. They must bear certain marks, such as year of manufacture,
and have sides that measure within specified dimensions. The gold in
American vaults is a mix of London good delivery and lower-quality bars.
Boehringer figured maybe the German bars had oddball weights and
purities and needed to be recast.
He did some quick math on the Bundesbank’s own numbers, dividing the
total weight it had disclosed for New York holdings by the number of
bars it listed. It came out to about 12.5 kilograms per bar—same as
London good delivery. If the central bank’s published numbers were
right, Boehringer says, “There would not be a reason to melt them, but
they did.”
Asked about the calculations, a Bundesbank spokesperson says meeting
the London good delivery standard “cannot be reduced entirely to the
weight of a gold bar but needs to take various other features into
account, one criterion being the outer appearance.” The spokesperson
also noted that “parts of the gold reserves, which were relocated from
New York to Frankfurt,” were recast to meet that standard.
Boehringer still doesn’t buy it. “Why, of all the possible
bars—120,000—it chose to repatriate, did it choose bars that were
nonconforming?” He also questions why the Bundesbank doesn’t publish
lists of bar numbers, which would allow other depositors to see if
there’s any double counting of the same gold under multiple owners. The
Bundesbank says it has such lists for all the gold it keeps in custody
at the New York Fed but that “security reasons” prevent it from making
those lists public.
“Why is a bar list a security risk?” Boehringer says. It reminds him
of the 1920s visit the Reichsbank president paid to the New York vault.
“That’s the culture of ‘I don’t want to know,’ ” he says.
Boehringer speculates that individual bars may have several owners,
perhaps as the result of bars being leased, sold, or subject to
complicated financial arrangements. “I can’t prove it,” he adds, saying
the onus of proof should be on the central bankers, not him. He isn’t
alone in raising doubts. John Hathaway, co-manager of the $1.3 billion
Tocqueville Gold Fund, says Germany might need the slow, seven-year
repatriation window to unwind complex financial arrangements by which
the gold was loaned out, perhaps several times. Their questions about
multiple owners aren’t completely out of left field, as there is a loan
market in which gold bars are put up as collateral and then sold to
third parties for the duration of the deals.
Piling gold bars at the Bundesbank headquarters in Frankfurt.
Photographer: Frank Rumpenhorst/EPA via Corbis
The German central bank says that’s not the case with its New York
gold and that its repatriation plans will be completed on schedule. “The
Deutsche Bundesbank has never loaned gold bars held in custody at the
New York Fed into the market or to other central banks,” the bank said.
The New York Fed says it isn’t party to any transactions that the
gold in its custody may be involved in. It says all gold bars on deposit
are present at the 33 Liberty St. vault and that the bank doesn’t
recognize any third-party rights or interests other than those of the
account holder. In response to questions for this story, the bank also
says foreign depositors are able to conduct inventories and that it
provides those depositors with lists of bar numbers for all holdings.
The gold may be in order. The gold may not be in order.
But either way, gold bugs around the world are winning unprecedented
concessions from their governments, and gold is streaming out of 33
Liberty St. and across the Atlantic.
In May 2014, the Bank of Italy, which has the third-biggest gold
reserves after the U.S. and Germany, ended years of secrecy by
disclosing the locations of its holdings. Citing the German
repatriations, the central bank said about half its gold is in Rome and
most of the rest is beneath the New York Fed. Then in November, the
Dutch central bank announced that it had secretly moved 122.5 tons of
gold from New York to Amsterdam. In apparently just months, the Dutch
had shipped almost 25 times the gold that Germany moved in all of 2013.
“Beyond realising a more balanced distribution of the gold stock across
the different locations, this may also have a positive effect on public
confidence,” the Dutch bank said in its announcement. Soon after, the
leader of France’s anti-euro, anti-immigration National Front party,
Marine Le Pen, asked the Bank of France for an independent audit of its
gold and to reveal any lending or financial commitments related to the
reserves.
At the end of November, a referendum in Switzerland to repatriate
some holdings failed but led the country’s central bank to disclose
locations and amounts of its gold for the first time. Swiss politicians
are pushing for more. “I want a clear inspection where you have a list
of all the gold bars, where it’s written that it’s fine gold and only
belongs to Switzerland,” says Lukas Reimann, a member of the Swiss
parliament who led the referendum.
On Jan. 19, the Bundesbank delivered its own surprise, publishing a
tally of its 2014 gold repatriations. During the year, the German
central bank had shipped 85 tons from New York to Frankfurt, blowing
away the mere 5 tons from 2013 and setting a pace at which the
Bundesbank would easily meet its target of 300 tons returned by 2020.
Even if the world’s biggest central banks did explain away his gold
bug speculations, Boehringer had triumphed. But for him, and his sense
of order, the itch is never scratched. There were still 1,447 tons of
German gold under Manhattan at year’s end, and he wants all of it back
in Frankfurt. At the current rate it would take more than 30 years for
all German gold stored abroad to return, he says.
And there’s this detail from the German announcement: “The Bundesbank
took advantage of the transfer from New York to have roughly 50 tonnes
of gold melted down and recast according to the London Good Delivery
standard.” Bar lists were cross-checked with bar markings, the statement
said. Spot checks found no irregularities. Yet any identifying trace of
the original gold had been wiped out, the bars “now destroyed,” a
freshly fired-up Boehringer says. Melted bars might not prove
something’s rotten under Liberty Street, but the mere disclosure shows
Boehringer is making a difference.
Along with Libya, Ukraine, Germany, and (????) other governments using their central banking agents, stole it. Nary an honest man in the world will come forward and stand up for peace.
The US-based Armenian Mirror Spectator has published an article titled “Wanted: Owners of Six Tons of Gold Left in Historic Armenia” by Edmond Y. Adazian. “Recently a story emerged in Switzerland about six tons of gold, shipped from historic Armenia to Geneva to be deposited at the Credit Suisse Bank, which refuses to release the treasure to a Turkish family who claims ownership,” Adazian writes.
The news first broke in the Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet, on October 17. A commentary about the case also appeared in the Turkiye newspaper by Prof. Cagri Erhan, who, rather than questioning the provenance of the treasure, questions the Credit Suisse Bank’s motives for refusing to give the gold to a businessman from Elazig (the historic Armenian city of Kharpert) named Sayid Ali Bayraki. The Elazig businessman, Sayid Ali Bayraki, has been fighting for many years to receive 800,000 Ottoman gold coins inherited from his father. The Swiss ambassador in Turkey, Raymond Kuntz, has traveled to Elazig to discuss the case of the gold, the origins of which are still shrouded in mystery. The author reminds that “Talaat Pasha has written in his “secret file” that 70,000 Armenians were deported from Elazig. No Armenians returned to Elazig. The wealthy Armenian families were also deported.” Almost all the deported families hid their gold in a secret place or trusted to their Muslim neighbors, hoping to return one day. And for years stories were being circulated about hidden Armenian treasures. Additionally many Armenians visit their parent’s native towns to discover their hidden treasures. “How could one carry 800,000 Ottoman gold coins, which weigh six metric tons, from Turkey to Switzerland?” the author asks, adding that “according to Mr. Bayraki, his father transported the six tons of gold to Switzerland, traveling on land and by sea.” Today, the 800,000 Ottoman gold coins are worth $3.5 billion. Prof. Cagri Erhan states: “As far as I know, in the first years of Republican Turkey no citizen has owned that kind of money. For example, when the IS bank was founded in 1924 its entire capital was 250,000 Turkish liras. It is a major problem to hide that kind of money from the government. According to Bayraki, his father had earned that money doing business and he had hidden the gold in a hole dug under the house. Earning the gold by doing business is questionable because after the Turkish Republic was established, business was no longer conducted through the Ottoman currency.” It looks like Bayraki’s father trusted the gold to the Swiss bank believing that the banking system which kept secrecy on Nazi gold would treat his treasures in the same way. But missed the fact that the gold deposited in the Swiss banks did not belong to the Nazis; it belonged to the Jews. “There is no doubt that the Armenian lobby, which misses no opportunity, has already focused on the gold whose source is ‘unknown.’ The bank Credit Suisse is already considering the case ‘scandalous’ and believes ‘there is some conspiracy behind it.’ Therefore, we see where the case is heading and it is not right to involve the prime minister. This may create an embarrassing situation for the entire country.” According to Adazian, “Professor Cagri maybe is referring to the Armenian lawyers when he mentions lobbyists, who went after the French and German banks and insurance companies and did a laudable job in recovering some of the funds owed to the victims of the Genocide . Fortunately, the good professor is not aware that the same lawyers have put aside the Turks for the moment and are at each other’s throats suing each other.” The author reminds that “By the same token, the generous benefactors who initially contributed princely sums to build a Genocide Museum are again at each other’s throats, suing each other and jeopardizing the completion of the museum in time for 2015.” “Six tons of gold are sitting in the Swiss bank. The gold is up for grabs and it can do a lot of good for Armenia. We have to rise up to the occasion. It is time to leave behind internecine squabbles and go after the gold,” the author concludes. Source LINK NOW REMOVED: armeniaradio
Three weeks ago, when looking at the latest NY Fed data of foreign gold held at the largest central bank gold vault in the world, we showed that in the month of November not only was a near record amount of gold withdrawn from the NY Fed, which at 42 tons was the single biggest monthly outflow at the NY Fed in over a decade… … but that though the end of November, all of the Netherlands' 122 tons of gold withdrawals had been fully accounted for. This brought up an interesting question:
"… net of the Netherlands withdrawals, there is some 44 tons of extra gold that has been also quietly redeemed (by another entity).
The question is who: is it now the turn of Austria to reveal in a few weeks that it too, secretly, withdrew some 40+ tons of gold from "safe keeping" in the US? Or was it Belgium? Or did the Dutch simply decide to haul back some more. Or did Germany finally get over its "logistical complications" which prevented it from transporting more than just a laughable 5 tons in 2013? And most importantly, did Germany finally grow a pair and decide not to let "diplomatic difficulties" stand between it and its gold?
We now know the answer, and it was, indeed, the latter with confirmation coming from the Bundesbank itself. As the German Central Bank announced earlier today, after withdrawing an embarrassing 5 tonnes of gold from New York in 2013, its rate of repatriation soared, and in what appears to have been just the past two months, has transferred a whopping 85 tonnes of gold from 80 feet below street level at Liberty 33 back to Frankfurt!
The Bundesbank successfully continued and further stepped up its transfers of gold last year. In 2014, 120 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt am Main from storage locations abroad: 35 tonnes from Paris and 85 tonnes from New York. "Implementation of our new gold storage plan is proceeding smoothly.
Operations are running very much according to schedule," said Carl-Ludwig Thiele, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank. The Bundesbank took advantage of the transfer from New York to have roughly 50 tonnes of gold melted down and recast according to the London Good Delivery standard, today's internationally recognised standard. "We also called on the expertise of the Bank for International Settlements for the spot checks that had to be carried out. As expected, there were no irregularities," said Mr Thiele.
According to its new gold storage plan, unveiled in January 2013, the Bundesbank will be storing half of Germany's gold reserves in its own vaults from 2020 onwards. This necessitates a phased transfer to Frankfurt am Main of 300 tonnes of gold from New York and all 374 tonnes of gold from Paris.
Since the transfers began in 2013, the Bank has relocated a total of 157 tonnes of gold to Frankfurt am Main – 67 tonnes from Paris and 90 tonnes from New York. This is equivalent to roughly 23% of the total quantity to be transferred. The following table gives an overview of the gold that has been transferred to date. As at 31 December 2014, the Bundesbank's gold reserves were stored at the following locations. And the punchline:
The Bundesbank assures the identity and authenticity of German gold reserves throughout the transfer process – from when they are removed from warehouses abroad until they are stored in Frankfurt am Main. As soon as the gold was removed from the warehouse locations abroad, Bundesbank employees cross-checked the lists of bars belonging to the Bundesbank against the information on the bars removed. Finally, once they arrived in Frankfurt am Main, all the transferred gold bars were thoroughly and exhaustively inspected and verified by the Bundesbank.
When all the inspections had been concluded, no irregularities came to light with regard to the authenticity, fineness and weight of the bars.
A curious amount of precautions and safeguards when transporting the "safe" and "untainted" gold held at the NY Fed to Frankfurt. Almost as if the Bundesbank, gasp, did not trust the quality and content of the NY Fed-held gold, nor its well-meaning intentions.
The official explanation was as follows: "The Bundesbank explained [the low amount of US gold] by saying that the transports from Paris are simpler and therefore were able to start quickly." Additionally, the Bundesbank had the "support" of the BIS "which has organized more gold shifts already for other central banks and has appropriate experience – only after months of preparation and safety could transports start with truck and plane." That would be the same BIS that in 2011 lent out a record 632 tons of gold…
Welt goes on to "debunk" various "conspiracy websites" that the reason why the gold is being melted is not to cover up some shortage (and to scrap serial numbers), but that the gold is exactly the same gold as before. Finally, to silences all skeptics, the Bundesbank says that "there is no reason for complaint – the weight and purity of the gold bars were consistent with the books match." In conclusion, Welt reports that in 2014 "larger transport volumes" can be expected from New York: between 30 and 50 tons.
Welt was off by just 50% with the full 2014 repatriated amount hitting 85 tons in what appears to have been a year-end scramble following the Netherlands repatriation shocker. And, as it turns out, all it took for the Bundesbank to send its repatriation amounts surging is for the Dutch to show it how it is done: i.e., by plane because crossing the Atlantic with a Brinks' truck full of gold certainly presents some "logisitcal challenges."
Sarcasm aside, it is quite clear that "logistical difficulties" is merely a politically correct strawman. Recall the real reason for the paltry repatriation by Buba in 2013, as explained by Deutsche Bank two months ago:
… the gold community paid great attention to the decision of the German Bundesbank to "bring German gold home". At the beginning of 2013, the Bundesbank announced it would repatriate 300 tonnes of gold stored in the US by 2020. It is well behind schedule, citing logistical difficulties. Yet diplomatic difficulties are more likely to be the chief cause of the delay, especially seeing as the Bundesbank has proven its capacity to organise large-scale gold transports. In the early 2000s, the Bundesbank incrementally repatriated 930 tonnes of German gold held by the Bank of England.
Which leads us to the only relevant question: now that the "diplomatic difficulties" have been overcome and the Bundesbank is back on track to repatriating precisely the right amount of gold from the NY Fed to indicate that it has far less faith in the US central bank than it did when it was barely conducting any transfers in 2013, just how worse as the diplomatic difficulties now? We expect to get at least a partial answer on Thursday when Mario Draghi finally announces his long-overdue €500 billion QE program, with Bundesbank's Jens Weidmann, sitting quietly in a corner, and ignored by the ex-Goldman head of the ECB, contemplated just how much more, if not all, gold (there is still some 517 tonnes of gold left to be repatriated to Germany from NY and Paris) he should withdraw now in preparation for the "next steps"?
One thing is certain: Germany sends its kindest gratitude to Ukraine, whose gold, now long gone, is most likely to be found in a far safer, and remelted, state somewhere in the bowels under Wilhelm-Epstein-Straße, number 14 in Frankfurt am Main.
+2%5B1%5D.jpg)
