Posted on 09/22/2005 5:35:28 AM PDT by Robert Drobot
MOSCOW, September 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's gold and currency reserves grew $3.1 billion in a week to reach $155 billion September 16 against $151.9 billion September 9, the Central Bank said Thursday.
I helped move over 47,000 bars of gold at the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox in the late 70's, as temporary labor to support a joint GAO/Treasury audit. This was less that 10% of the gold there. Bars averaged around 28 pounds each, you do the math.
Your statement is tinfoil hat conspiracy theory at its finest.
I suppose there are a few additional ways to pay the piper for all that 'sugar'.
Your stats are not real time, pal.
Yeah, well after Y2K, it all won't matter, will it?
I would speculate that the Russians increasing their gold holdings is a very smart move. We are probably going to go through another round of high inflation within the next 4-5 years (just my personal opinion. They certianly wouldn't want to hold dollar assets in any case.
.......and santa uses slave labor. So what. Post the audit results.
What are you on?
Tell that to Trump.
It that all you've got. You are not worthy.
You are not worthy.
"Ownership of firearms is a 'may I' proposition in the once late great America, now the land of wieners and wusses."
Nah, the gangs, drug smugglers and other criminals still have plenty of cojones. They don't give a damn about any steekin' gun laws.
So your current conspiracy theory is that LBJ secretly sold almost all of our gold reserves in the 60s?
I can remember when someone was claiming that a certain English-born Swiss gentleman was going to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox using a Chinese atomic device, in order to increase the value of his own reserves. But that didn't really come to pass either, did it?
Can't wait to hear the next Fort Knox conspiracy theory!
No, I am being serious. Whatever it is, I want some of it.
"When we were last on the Gold Standard the U.S. (not the Soviet Union) was the one that was hemorrhaging gold to pay for Vietnam and Johnson's WOP."
And now we're hemorrhaging IOU's to pay for Iraq and Bush's War on Katrina. Things haven't changed much.
My desired reply would get me banned.
You post from ignorance and conspiracy theory, and I'll leave it at that.
I know damn well I was there, that we moved around 47,000 bars, and that I could see through the peepholes into many other sealed vaults that we didn't touch, that were full. We moved 2 vaults.
And I wasn't "slave labor", I was well-paid by the standards of the time. I think I was making something like $3.85 an hour.
Get lost.
"Yeah, well after Y2K, it all won't matter, will it?"
That was good, very good. :)
What does this prove? With Gold soaring up OF COURSE the dollar denominated value of the gold the Ruskies hold is going to be higher week over week. News flash - it's gonna be way higher this week too.
Do you have the amount in oz's or grams? That would tell more of the story.
As for our fiat currency being good, well not this year. You would have been much better off to buy gold (or gold based financial instruments like GLD or IAU) rather than hold cash.
We don't know how much gold is in Ft. Knox, but other than scaring the horses, it doesn't matter much. Our currency is completely de-linked and everyone knows it.
Still it's sad that there is so little transparency in the financial system. The Fed operations are still mostly secret and they have, apparently, been lying and obfiscating about the amount of gold we hold, and also interfering in markets to supress the price.
The real story probably isn't about Russian doing anything to the gold markets (after all they are huge gold producers, high prices are good for them) but about a concerted effort to keep gold prices down, engineered by the Fed. That, at least, is the theory of GATA.
What makes your chart less-than meaningful is that the IMF which sets the rules for reserve accounting allows central banks to count gold "on loan" as the same as gold. The central banks took to loaning gold to make money on the "barbarous relic" in the 90s, usually at 2%. They did this lending to help them earn money on an otherwise useless assett (they claim, though why the Fed would NEED to make money is an interesting question given it's mission and the fact that it returns excess profit to the treasury).
So the gold is leant to gold brokers (Chase, for instance) who then pay 2% for it. What they did was sell it and use the money to buy things that earn money. Like T-Bills at 5%. (See how rich you can get with big money and insider friends!) Figuring, if we ever need to return the gold we'll buy more.
Supposedly one of the reason's Greenspan stepped in to bail out LTCM in the late 90s was they were major gold shorters and it threated to crack the system.
The truth is becuase of the bogus accounting we just don't know what's out there.
It's all big CONfidence game. We're more vulnerable now vs. then as we were a creditor back then. When folks tire of our paper the empire will be over.
Greenspan did NOT bail out LTCM.
LTCM's failure had nothing to do with gold. LTCM was basically a few simple arbitrage plays that were immensely profitable so long as they and their imitators did not become the proverbial whale in the bathtub, which of course they did.
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