Previously by Alasdair Macleod: Shadow Banking: The Next Landmine
Last Wednesday the Bundesbank released a statement to the effect that 300 tonnes of Germany’s gold will be moved from New York and 374 tonnes from Paris. This should be a simple operation: rail or trucks from Paris, and a few military planeloads (or ships) from America – as soon as they have somewhere to store it.
Instead they plan to do it over the next seven years, which is a postponement. This tends to confirm suspicions that the gold does not actually exist. As a side issue, along with the Bundesbank statement is a PDF download with slide number 14 entitled "Storage at the Federal Reserve Bank New York". It looks like a photomontage rather than real gold, and the come-on is to believe it’s the Bundesbank’s. This gives the game away: the whole exercise is a public relations stunt.
Why hold any gold in New York nowadays? The Soviets are no longer menacing the Fulda Gap. Yes, New York is obviously still a critical trading venue, but not for physical gold – the Bundesbank apparently withdrew 940 tonnes from the Bank of England in 2000, where the physical market is actually located.
The reason this matters is that independent deductive analysis has concluded that the central banks have been supplying the market with physical bullion in order to suppress the price, all of which is either officially denied or goes unanswered. The origin of price suppression actually go back to the 1990s, and was exposed by Frank Veneroso in a paper published in 1998, confirmed by detective work from our own James Turk, and triply confirmed by the evasive responses on this issue given by central banks and the IMF to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA). The public are unaware of this issue because the mainstream media, with the occasional exception, refuses to investigate the subject.
But here is something that joins up a few more dots. We know that Gordon Brown sold half of Britain’s gold at the bottom of the market from 1999-2002. We commonly assume that he was just incompetent. What is not commonly appreciated is that he learned his economics from Ed Balls, the current Shadow Chancellor. As his economics advisor, Balls was the puppet-master and Chancellor Brown the puppet. Ed Balls was also a close friend of Larry Summers, who was US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury from 1995 and then Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 – the time of Britain’s gold sales. As Treasury secretary Summers was head of the Exchange Stabilization Fund, the US government’s mechanism for supplying bullion to the markets. In the light of these deeply Keynesian relationships from the mid-1990s, it is unlikely that Brown acted in isolation. More than likely Washington was also supplying the market through swaps and leases that were never recorded as changes of ownership.
The net result is that there is not enough physical gold left in the vault to deliver to Germany, which is why they are stalling for time. What was presented to us last Wednesday was just a desperate attempt to stop the whole issue becoming more public.
Reprinted with permission from GoldMoney.com.
Alasdair Macleod runs FinanceAndEconomics.org, a website dedicated to sound money and demystifying finance and economics. Alasdair has a background as a stockbroker, banker and economist. He is a Senior Fellow at the GoldMoney Foundation.
