potentielles vente d'or , retour en arriere avec ce document
explosif d'avril 2001 de James Turk
nota ESF désigne European social fund, le FMI à l'échelle européenne ..
http://www.esf.gov.uk/index.aspà lire absolument .. vous serez .. éberlués du tour de passe passe !!
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What is the real story re Germany’s gold? Since we are blast from the pasting, you might like to review what GATA’s insightful James Turk wrote some time ago on the subject. The timing to do so is perfect:
April 23, 2001 (with the gold price at $265)
Behind Closed Doors
by James Turk
© by The Freemarket Gold & Money Report.
…Let’s put one and one together here to see if we can come up with an answer. According to Virgil Mattingly, the ESF has authorized gold swaps, presumably in the recent past (circa 1995). According to Ted Truman, the only outstanding swap facility of the ESF (circa 1995) other than the one established for Mexico is their facility with the Bundesbank. Ergo, the ESF has a gold swap facility with the Bundesbank.
It’s an interesting proposition, and one that fits well with another newly discovered fact. Some very interesting sleuthing by Mike Bolser, who has been assisting Reg Howe in his lawsuit against the BIS, has revealed that the Treasury has made a small but very significant accounting change. Mike noticed that the Treasury Department has changed the designation of nearly 1700 tonnes of inventoried gold at the US Mint’s facility in West Point, New York (approximately 21% of the total US Gold Reserve) from "Gold Bullion Reserve" to "Custodial Gold".
The August 2000 Status Report on US Treasury Owned Gold stored at West Point has a designation of "Gold Bullion Reserve". See:
http://207.87.26.43/gold/00-08.html. But the September 2000 and subsequent status reports inexplicably designate this same gold that is stored at the US Mint in West Point as "Custodial Gold". See:
http://207.87.26.43/gold/00-09.htmlThis change was made without explanation, so rather than let the matter remain unexplained, Mike diligently contacted the Treasury asking what seemingly are two uncomplicated questions. Would the Treasury please explain why they made this change, and what does this change in designation mean with respect to the ownership status of the gold at West Point?
They are simple questions, but perhaps they touch too close to a nerve. Not surprisingly, the Treasury so far has not responded to Mike. I have some views on what Mike discovered, and why the Treasury is so quiet about it. I think this change in asset classification is related to the ESF gold swaps. Here’s my thinking.
The change Mike spotted possibly occurred as a result of accountants looking at the financial statements of the US Mint being prepared for its annual report ending fiscal year 2000. Note that the previous director of the Mint (Phillip Diehl) resigned in early 2000, so this was the first annual report signed by the new director (Jay Johnson). If there is one thing that government bureaucrats do well, they take great pains to call things by their right name. To do otherwise would put their job in jeopardy if something under their responsibility came under Congressional scrutiny, and it was subsequently determined that the name assigned to something was incorrect or misleading.
Therefore, this change in the descriptive label for nearly 1,700 tonnes of gold at West Point from "Gold Bullion Reserve" to "Custodial Gold" was purposeful. It happened for a reason. This conclusion is all the more plausible because the Treasury did not change the classification from "Gold Bullion Reserve" to "Custodial Gold" to describe the gold stored in Fort Knox or at the US Mint in Denver. Maybe new US Mint director Johnson saw something he didn't like. What could that have been?
I’ve already put one-and-one together to establish that the ESF has "gold swaps" with the Bundesbank. It therefore does not require much conjecture to add one supposition to the equation by concluding that the gold in West Point has been swapped with gold owned by the Bundesbank, thereby necessitating its reclassification from "Gold Bullion Reserve" to "Custodial Gold". Here’s what I think has happened.
The Treasury Department wanted to make gold available to some bullion banks. This statement is based on my basic premise that several of the big banks have gold books that are hopelessly imbalanced. By having borrowed short and loaned long, these banks have in their quest for profits imprudently fallen into the alluring but usually fatal banker’s deathtrap – a mismatched loan book. But what’s worse for these banks, it is even more difficult and treacherous to try extricating themselves from this particular deathtrap because they haven’t mismatched their loan book of dollars, which we all know can be created by the Federal Reserve ‘out of thin air’ if dollars are needed to bailout banks from a deathtrap predicament. Instead, these banks have mismatched their gold book. And no one – not even the Federal Reserve – can create gold out of thin air.
So given this reality about the nature of gold, the Treasury had to turn elsewhere to find the gold necessary (1) to keep these banks from defaulting on their bullion obligations arising from their mismatched gold books in an environment where metal had become increasingly difficult to come by and/or (2) to keep the gold price low so that the likelihood of default by the banks would be lessened, even though metal would remain tight because fabrication year after year was exceeding newly mined supply. Rather than accept the bitter pill that certain banks were about to default on their bullion obligations, the Treasury looked for alternatives and found one – they put their hand into the till, until recently known as the Gold Bullion Reserve at West Point. They swapped this gold with the Bundesbank. I’ll explain how they did it, but let’s first consider the practical aspects of this transaction.
In all likelihood, these particular bullion banks needed gold in Europe where their obligations were originally established. There is very little gold lending in New York. It is a practical problem to ship the gold out of West Point without raising the alarm of government auditors. It is costly too. Also, it is likely that some of the gold in West Point is coin-melt from the 1933 gold confiscation. Even if it could be smuggled out of the West Point vault into the market without raising suspicions, the alarm bells would go off at the refiner and soon thereafter in the market because everyone knows that only the US government has coin-melt bars. The appearance of coin-melt bars in the market would immediately raise suspicions that the US Gold Reserve was being dishoarded, an outcome that the Treasury would obviously take steps to avoid in concocting its scheme because the US Gold Reserve cannot be depleted without Congressional approval. Therefore, one is faced with the practical considerations of overcoming these hurdles, but the answer is relatively simple.
The Treasury has gold in West Point. The Bundesbank has gold in Europe. The Treasury cannot directly do a deal with the Bundesbank because unlike the ESF, the Treasury is subject to Congressional oversight. So instead the Secretary of the Treasury and the President decide to use the ESF to set up a swap line for gold with the Bundesbank.
By so doing, the gold in the Bundesbank’s vault in Europe becomes ESF gold, to do with as they please – i.e., the ESF lends this metal to bailout certain bullion banks. And the Bundesbank now owns the gold in West Point, which as a result was purposefully re-classified from Gold Bullion Reserve to Custodial Gold because the Treasury no longer owns this gold, having swapped it out through the ESF in exchange for gold in Europe owned by the Bundesbank. Case closed. The mystery of the abnormally low gold price is solved. The ESF did it.
The abnormally low gold price is the result of the mounting irrefutable evidence that the ESF is deeply involved in the gold market, and I do mean deep. They are involved in some 1,700 tonnes worth because that is the weight of gold stored in West Point, which was probably being swapped at the rate of a few hundred tonnes per year from circa 1995 through 2000. There are two other tidbits that I would like to share with you that add even more validity to this supposition.
First, a couple of months ago I was analyzing the 1998 and 1999 balance sheets of the ESF. Being an ex-banker, I know a little bit about accounting, including where to find the big holes through which the proverbial truck can be driven. And suffice it to say, I found one of those, which could suggest that in these two years 975 tonnes of gold came into the market from the ESF. Interestingly, after reaching this conclusion, I wanted to test it. So I called a top gold market expert whose supply/demand analyses are second to none, and who believes that gold from the US reserves has been coming into the market for several years.
Without telling him about my analysis of the ESF balance sheet, I asked him how much gold he thought came out of the Treasury/ESF in 1998 and 1999 in total. His response was 1,000 tonnes, a mere 25 tonnes difference from what I deduced from the ESF financial statements. When I told him this, that we had both reached the same conclusion from different sources, he chuckled but was not in the least bit surprised, being so convinced that the Treasury/ESF has been a major source of metal for years. I have thoroughly reviewed his supply/demand numbers since 1994 and have determined that as much as 2,000 tonnes of gold from the US reserve may have entered the market in order to make the gold price as low as it is, which leads me to the second tidbit that I would like to share with you. It is just as intriguing.
This same individual told me several months ago about some astonishing intelligence he had learned from a source in Europe. He told me that the Bundesbank’s gold vault was empty, which seemed so preposterous that I found it hard to believe. He also admitted that this news startled him when he learned about it, and that he did not have an adequate explanation for it. He knew that the Bundesbank was an active lender of gold, but he had a difficult time accepting the possibility that all 3,400 tonnes that it owned had been loaned. Yet he was confident that his source had provided him with accurate information.
We now know what has happened. The Bundesbank has loaned 1,700 tonnes, one-half of its 3,400 tonnes reserve; the other 1,700 tonnes were swapped for gold in the US reserves, requiring the change in the West Point vault from Gold Bullion Reserve to Custodial Gold. In other words, the Bundesbank’s vault is empty because one-half of their gold is stored in West Point not Europe, and the other half has been loaned out.
Despite the irrefutable proof that the ESF is involved in the gold market, two questions remain unanswered. First, what’s the ESF’s motive? Unfortunately, we just don’t know for certain.
Many, including me, claim that it is to use gold to provide the liquidity needed to bailout some big banks that have imprudently grown their gold books by recklessly expanding credit and mismatching their asset/liability maturities. These banks are the ones with the unusual – some say abnormal – derivative activities that are named as co-defendants in Reg Howe’s suit against the BIS. That this list includes Germany’s largest bank may explain why the Bundesbank would agree to participate in this gold swap scheme. It was bailing out one of its own.
Others claim the ESF aims to manipulate the gold price to make inflation numbers look better than they really are by keeping the gold price artificially low. And there are some who argue that the US government, acting at the behest and under the instructions of the big banks, aim to destroy their combined arch enemy – gold, regardless of the fact that the gold mining industry would be destroyed along with it.
This last theory is not outlandish. It has currency because gold is the world’s only free-market money. In contrast to national currencies, all of which circulate only because of government fiat, Gold’s value derives from everyone who understands that it has usefulness as money. And governments and banks don’t like the fact that while they can manipulate gold for a time – and as have we have seen in recent years, even a long time – they cannot in the end control the price of gold anymore than they can control the price of a Picasso painting. The value of a Picasso is determined by the free-market, and so too is gold. In short, you and I give gold its value – not the central banks, not the US government or any other government, either acting alone or together. But the US government either has not yet learned – or refuses to admit – this reality that its power to control gold is limited, which is an inexplicable conclusion unless you accept the notion that governments have short memories and need to relearn what logic says they should have learned from experience.
If logic prevailed, the US government would have learned from its ill-fated attempt in the 1960’s to keep the price of gold abnormally cheap at $35 per ounce that the market determines gold’s value. But instead, the US government is about to learn that it cannot keep a manipulated ‘floating-rate’ gold price from rising any more than it was able to keep the manipulated ‘fixed-rate’ gold price from rising thirty years ago. The free-market rate of exchange between dollars and gold will prevail, eventually repeating today what happened in the 1970’s after the artificially low $35 rate was no longer tenable – the gold price will skyrocket higher. It is well worthwhile keeping in mind that the gold price rose nearly three-fold in the eighteen months after the fixed-rate price was abandoned in August 1971.
Then there is the second unanswered question. To what extent is today’s exceptionally low gold price the responsibility of certain bullion banks, which have cheapened gold by extending gold credit to such an extreme, and the ESF, by perpetuating this scheme? This question too does not have an answer, at least not yet. But as the truth about the ESF’s involvement in the gold market continues to emerge and become more widely known, the price of gold is destined to rise to a more normal level, just like it did after August 1971. The high price that gold eventually achieves will indicate how badly certain bullion banks and the ESF have damaged gold mining companies and the gold industry.
In conclusion, while we don’t know whether any of these motives for manipulating the gold price that I ascribed to the US government are accurate, one point is clear and cannot be denied. The US government cannot claim that the ESF is not involved with gold. We now have the irrefutable proof that establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the ESF is indeed involved in the gold market. We know this for a fact because of our peek behind closed doors. ¤
jamesturk@goldmoney.comPS: The Treasury responded months later by remaming all US Gold Reserves as "Deep Storage Gold." When caught, just change the game again. Another farce, and shading of the truth, when it comes to the gold market.
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Pépite Bull 
Sujet: à propos de la buba qui refait du bruit autour de 
Mar 15 Nov 2005 - 22:42
