Today James Turk shocked King World News when he stated, “The entire German gold hoard was gone because it had been leased into the marketplace. Meaning, the vaults holding German gold were emptied by 2001 because of the Bundesbank leasing activities.”
Turk added, “Half of the gold they (the Germans) leased themselves. The other half of Germany’s gold hoard was eventually leased into the market as well through complicated swaps with the US. But the reality is that as of 2001, all of that German gold was gone. Meaning all German gold worldwide, which was supposed to be stored in vaults, the vaults were emptied of German gold and the gold was leased into the market.”
Turk went on to say, “It’s uncertain if any of that leased gold has ever been returned to those vaults. Meaning, the vaults which are supposed to be storing the German gold hoard may still be empty.”
Incredibly, 11 years ago James Turk had diagnosed the problems of the missing German gold hoard. Here is the 2001 piece titled, “Behind Closed Doors” in which he exposed the German gold was in fact missing:
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From the FOMC transcripts it is quite apparent that Ted Truman has a special role. Though recorded in the attendee list in the FOMC transcripts under the featureless title of "economist", his role is anything but ordinary. The transcripts reveal that he clearly speaks for the Treasury Department in FOMC meetings, and is very knowledgeable about the ESF. The insight displayed by him in the FOMC minutes makes it clear that he is not just fully informed about the ESF and its operations, but that he probably is also intimately involved in ESF decision making. Consequently, the following excerpt is particularly intriguing.
MR. PARRY. What is the size of the ESF?
MR. TRUMAN. The usable funds in the ESF today, counting the foreign exchange as usable, amount to roughly $25 billion.
MR. PARRY. Can you say how it is broken down?
MR. TRUMAN. About $5 billion is invested in Treasury securities and the balance is roughly equally divided between marks and yen. I think they have slightly more yen than marks. MR. PARRY. Thank you.
MR. BOEHNE. Is any of it obligated in any way beyond what we are talking about with Mexico?
MR. TRUMAN. It is obligated only in the sense that they have one other swap arrangement with the Bundesbank.
Wouldn't it be interesting to know what this swap arrangement with the Bundesbank entailed? What is the nature of this swap? Is it a Dollar/Deutschemark swap facility? Or is something else being swapped, like gold perhaps?
Gold being swapped with the Bundesbank? It's an outrageous thought. Or is it? I have already established that the ESF is very much involved with gold. The only thing I haven't established is with whom the ESF has those gold swaps that Virgil Mattingly was talking about.
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.
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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.
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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.
KWN will follow up with Turk at the beginning of next week for more coverage on this unbelievable situation.