Gold Confiscation Not A Possibility by Jim Sinclair

jsmineset. ^ | November 24, 2012, at 2:24 am | by Jim Sinclair

[dennisw]

Gold Confiscation Not A Possibility

Hi Jim,

I know you receive tons of emails, so I will get right down to the core of my question. In a note on kingworldnews.com today Richard Russell wrote:

“At any rate, I’m personally torn between putting all my assets into bullion gold coins or leaving half in gold and half of my assets in US dollars. In their demand to making Fed notes the only legal tender money, I believe the Fed (and the government) would stoop to any trick or law or machination to ensure that Americans must accept Fed notes as the only legal tender money. The government (Congress?) could pass a law outlawing any transactions in gold or silver or any precious metal.  The government could halt the trading of gold or gold ETFs.  Or there might be a dozen tricks that the government could use that would outlaw the use of gold as legal tender. Then, there are always taxes as a barrier to even owning or trading gold. So I dunno, hold all your assets in gold bullion coins?  Frankly, I’m afraid to.  The bankers demand that I use their rotten fiat notes as money, and believe me, the bankers (the Fed) run the country.”

What is your take on this possibility Jim? Do you think we would see warning signs before TPTB does anything on that? If you have already treated this issue in a previous post, please excuse me and feel free to forget about this email. Thanks for all you do so generously for all of us sheeple.

CIGA Michel

 

 

Dear Michel,

My respect for Richard Russell could not be higher. I will speak to this generically while recognizing "Richard the Good" stands along with "Dean Harry Schultz" as the only true two icons of gold. All others are but pretenders to the golden throne for some personal profit motive. Anyone seeking to dim another’s candle that theirs might shine brighter are as sociopathic as the banksters in our crowd for what they can get.

There was much to be gained by gold confiscation in the 1930s because we were on a gold standard. Without taking you into complicated explanations, please accept the true fact that gold in the 1930s was the only instruments of QE. It is not now nor will it be again in the future. There may be more to gain by a significant price of gold in the new reserve currency. There is no reason except some sort of fear of revenge to consider confiscation of gold, gold shares or the gold ETFs now. Those that worry so much about this do not really understand what gold was under a gold standard.

Why was energy not confiscated at $145 crude? Why not confiscate Apple at $750? Confiscation is NOT going to occur, nor will the gold bullion or gold share profits be confiscated via punitive taxation. It serves no monetary purpose and just might injure the efforts for a new reserve currency that is sure to come.

Respectfully,
Jim

[drpix]

Gold was NOT confiscated because "gold in the 1930s was the only instruments of QE."

The "true fact{s}" of FDR's 1933 confiscation can be found in "The Bank Runs of the Early 1930s and FDR's Ban on Gold" (forbes.com) from which the following excerpt comes:

"In April 1933 FDR and his allies at the Fed and Treasury attributed widespread bank runs and failures to private “gold hoarding.” Using the “Trading With the Enemy Act” (1917) as a precedent – an act that gave the president wide latitude to restrict exchanges and seize assets during “emergencies” – FDR declared that private gold should be seized and given over to the Fed, in return for irredeemable Federal Reserve Notes, to stem an emergency in the banking system. This was sanctified in the Gold Reserve Act (January 1934), which required that any gold held contrary to U. S. law must be forfeited to the U. S. government. Key parts of the “Trading With the Enemy Act” pertaining to gold seizures persist in the U.S. Code even today."

Such bank run have recently occurred in Argentina, where citizens created the run to buy US dollars (rather than gold) and the government enacted draconian restrictions on buying and owning US dollars.

If such a bank run would occur today in the US it would not be to buy/own US dollars (since that is the currency the bank already holds it in) it would be to buy and own gold. Under such circumstance the ill founded assurances in this thread's article that 'gold would not be confiscated' should be no assurance at all.

[pingman]

If you look to the past, one history lesson is France in 1720, after John Law had exploded the concept of land based credit. In the aftermath, the Froggies banned ownership of more than a trifling amount of gold to shore up their once-again worthless currency.

History repeats...

[BenLurkin]

Ha!

[hosepipe]

Better bury some gold(silver) and few fire arms as well..
Better in large gauge PVC pipes.. because they be comin’...
They’re not ready for confiscation yet.. but its comin’..

Animal farm is almost here.. presently their only “MILKING”..
The slaughter houses have not begun yet..
They will not use the word “Soylent Green” they will use a different word..

The “Purges” are coming.. Stalin was the lefts Patron Saint..
Very much proof of tactics by Mao, Stalin and Hitler..
One World Givernment is a reachable dream of many Americans..

They are for making countrys mere STATEs or Provence’s..
Amazing how accurate John Birch was almost 100% correct..
Also amazing that many have never heard of John Birch...

[CodeToad]

Not to mention, when someone says something can’t happen, obviously some one has already suggested it to give them the idea to respond to it.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

[physical] "Confiscation is NOT going to occur, nor will the gold bullion or gold share profits be confiscated via punitive taxation. It serves no monetary purpose and just might injure the efforts for a new reserve currency that is sure to come."

This a multi-faceted statement and I don't think the issues nor risks are as pat as Sinclair states. To parse:

1: "Confiscation is NOT going to occur" OK, I can accept that. This does NOT rule out the possibility that as of xx/yy/zz, per executive order # 12345, all openings of bank safety deposit boxes must be supervised by a Federal Marshall.

tin? Have we seen enough tin over the past few years so that we should not be surprised at redefinitons of same?

2: "..nor will the gold bullion profits [be confiscated via punitive taxation].." I do not believe this can be predicted! In fact, if you think about it, gold could be seriously DE-monetized from its quasi-monetary function by imposing severe taxes on sales of gold. Suppose the government imposed a $1000 per ounce tax on the sale of bullion and threw in some gobbledygook about Eagles and/or pre-1933 gold coins as collectibles. Let's just think about bullion: Credit Suisse or Perth Mint or APMEX or JM or Englehard bars. What then? Anyone who had (what they believed was) their gold stash in those forms would be faced with a serious issue. Let's say they bought their gold over a range of $450. - $1350. and are right now thinking they are sitting fairly pretty.

To get anything near spot price out their gold, they would have to engage in a tax-evasion transaction. But who would buy such gold anywhere market price? They, too, would be subject to the same conundrum upon sale. In other words, gold would be forced into black market status and the spot value would not be obtainable since transactions in same would be not illegal per se, but strongly implying illegal.

3: "...nor will (GLD profits) be confiscated via punitive taxation." << I can believe that, GLD is just stupid stock.

4: "It serves no monetary purpose and just might injure the efforts for a new reserve currency that is sure to come.

4: Heh. Sez you. (And I greatly respect Jim Sinclair) but neither he nor anyone else can accurately predict the future. That something today serves or does not serve any monetary purpose means utterly nothing. After all, we are probably going to be jacking tax rates to raise revenues when all prior experiences show that lowering rates is the thing that raises tax revs. But see, we do this out of "fairness". So it is not a given that "making monetary sense" will be the prevailing rule of logic or law. Maybe we're going to be forced to "play fair", but it will be the 0bama's definition of "fair".

[SkyDancer]

Didn’t FDR do that at the beginning of the Depression?

[zagger]

The reality is that very few people did obey the FDR decree. Which is why a confiscation of any physical asset is unlikely. The reality is that high inflation and the resulting effective confiscation of everybody’s savings is the smart way to go for the feds. No need to have armed confrontations with gold bugs. Or raids on farmers. Or nationalization of oil. Just quietly remove the paper wealth until nothing is left. When they are done, the average waitress will be able to pay off the national debt on one day's tips. This is how it has been done in the past and the way it will be done in the future. It won't matter if you are a millionaire or billionaire, your savings will be effectively zeroed out. The entire Weimar meltdown experience happened in 3 months after 10 years of political wrangling. What will you do in the last 3 months to save yourself?

[muir_redwoods]

Gold, silver and lead, for a start

[tumblindice]

What have you done, or what are you doing?

[bgill]

Anything can be confiscated.

[BfloGuy]

They don't care about your gold.

Your gold only matters if it's considered "money" and competes with those green pieces of paper the Fed keeps cranking out.

FDR confiscated the gold because, in those days, there was an expectation a law that the federal government would redeem your dollars for gold at any bank window. Every time someone did, the national gold stock was depleted a tiny bit more and the Fed was supposedly constrained from printing more paper dollars because of it.

Those days are long gone. What was once "our" money [i.e., you owned money like you do your property] was socialized. FDR accomplished what he wanted.

We can own gold, now. But its ties to the nation's money have been broken.

And see where that's got us.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

I’m afraid Mr. Sinclair doesn’t recognize the fact the U.S. is now run as a kleptocracy.

“...not a possibility” shows his lack of understanding of just what kind of men and women are now in control. There’s no limit to their willingness to steal what isn’t nailed down.

[M Kehoe]

Good evening.

Gold Confiscation Not A Possibility by Jim Sinclair

Sorry Jim, it's happened before, it can happen again...for different reasons.

Right now Jim, I prefer to invest in brass and lead. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and a thrill up my leg.

5.56mm

[TEXOKIE]

bttt

[Freedom4US]

That’s not quite what happened.

Gold (an element of the Periodic Table, 79 AU) was criminalized, which is kind of bizarre. It was confiscation in the sense thatt they gave people pieces of paper in exchange. Numismatic coins having “special collector” value were exempt, and individuals were allowed to keep $100 of regular issue coins, or about five Troy ounces. They didn’t wait “a few years” to ramp up the price, though.

And plenty of people were apparently tipped off ahead of time, because of the staggering huge number of US coins that were leaving America for Europe just prior to the ban. Pre-1933 US coinage is relatively common today, because of this early bird expatriation.

FDR ran on a campaign of strict adherence to a strong dollar gold standard. Go figure.

Just as importantly, the government reneged on gold bonds, sold to help pay for the first wars of the world, stiffing the flyover rubes yet again. Another casualty were gold clause contracts, where long term financial contracts were routinely denominated in ounces of gold, because 99 year leases have no meaning when expressed in paper money. You end up renting a whole skyscraper for a few thousand dollars a month by the end of the lease.

What Roosevelt did was worse than all this, because he repudiated contract law. As far as future monkey business in this area, someone would have to make the case that the US needs to return to the gold standard, so far that has decidedly not been the case. The immediate effect would be that the US would then lose all its remaining gold. People tend to forget just why it was Mr. Nixon felt compelled to renege on that last remaining link to gold and let currencies float.

And such a move (confiscation/criminalization) would likely be counterproductive and tend to call into question any number of assumptions about the state of affairs. For one thing, “they” already stole the largest pile ever recorded in human history, some 10,000 tons, under the guise that “hoarding” is “against public policy” (though presumably, when it’s stored in one location aka Ft. Knox, that isn’t “hoarding.”

Trying to be objective as possible, I just don’t see such a move as being too shrewd and would only serve to make an already skeptical everbody even more so. I suppose they can take the normal psy-op method and brand everyone who has a coin collection a Tourist, lumped in with bitter clingers, smokers, sane individuals, etc. And offer rewards (not in gold, probably?) to turn in those Evil Speculators.

You can bet your bottom Peace Dollar all those folks in years past when gold was $262 who were almost apoplectic whenever purchasing gold was suggested will be first in line to turn in their fellow comrade. FDR had the crime punishable by a year in jail and $10,000 - about $890,000 in todays money - er, in gold.

Just remember - nobody could see this coming.

[Freedom4US]

What I recall reading, it was very common for Argentinians to have dollar denominated bank accounts. What the government did, was convert those accounts into Peso accounts. And then restrict withdrawals to a trifling amount of the trifle purchasing power it represented.

This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, which explains the existence of overseas accounts going back centuries. From time to time, creditors say “no more” and people get left holding the bag. Just prior to WW first, thousands of tourists were left stranded on the continent or in London, because overnight their checks drawn on foreign banks were not honored anymore. In more recent decades, those holding dollars, at least outside banking circles in the parasite, er, host country, did quite well. Deutschmarks, Swiss Francs, and other currencies issued by stable governments did quite well.

Sinclair brings up a valid point - why is gold subject to such visceral anger, but not say, Yahoo stock or Muni bonds? I don’t care what other people do with their money, or at least not enough to make it a full time hobby trying to dissuade people with arguments like “it’s really heavy”. Hm.

[Freedom4US]

Weimar inflation, while it went especially nonsensical in 1923, it went went on for many years, in fits and starts, and at times even showed signs of leveling off or moderating before starting up again. It had the effect of people thinking that maybe the government had things under control. Lasted far longer than a few months.

It DID show up out of the blue e.g. “like lightning it struck... it was terrible..” As one man recounted.

[RetiredTexasVet]

When I hear these self proclaimed experts say “they can’t or they won’t” I mentally translate that to “they just haven’t done it yet” and take precautions!

[SkyPilot]

Your post #26 makes excellent points.

It seems to me that Jim Sinclair (whoever he is) wrote this piece as a wishful self-fulfilling prophecy. In my mind, he wrote this hoping that if he spins it enough, someone in power will read it and back off from gold confiscation in the near future.

I am guessing Sinclair owns some gold, or he owns some pieces of paper that says he owns real gold stashed somewhere by somebody that he hopes to trades for real gold someday. He wrote that confiscation will "never happen" in order to plant the seed to the powers that be to leave his gold alone.

In this case: Fail.