LEW ROCKWELL SEEING OBFUSCATED GOLD FIGURES AS WELL

As many of you know I like to pop in on other websites and see what they see is going on, like The Daily Bell, or, Lew Rockwell, and this time it's Lew Rockwell. This one in particular caught my eye, because Mr. Charles Goyette, in an article at Lew Rockwell, is seeing the same problem I have been seeing, and which I've blogged about on occasion, and commented about in some interviews, namely, obfuscated figures for the actual amount of gold in existence in the world:

Are the Central Bank Vaults Empty?

Consider carefully the opening paragraphs:

"Is it possible that the vaults of the world’s central banks, believed to be stacked with gold bullion, are really empty? Is all the gold actually there?

"Something about the numbers doesn’t seem to add up.

"The importance of the question accelerates in the face of global money-printing, which is also accelerating. Since the start of the economic meltdown five years ago, the balance sheets of the world’s central banks have been growing at a frantic pace.

"The U.K. has led the pack, up 362%, followed by the United States, which is up 223% – even before QE III. China is printing money as well, up 151% during the period, the European Central Bank, 146%, and Japan, 83%."

And now consider the closing paragraphs:

"At one point (in October 2008), 70% of Fed loans were to foreign banks. Foreign recipients of the windfall included powerful European banks: Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and others.

"Among the disclosures the Fed was forced to make is that it extended 73 separate loans for an aggregate $35 billion to Arab Bank Corp., owned in substantial part by the Central Bank of Libya.

"The Fed is a hot bed of cronyism: The discount window, bond purchasing, its primary dealer system and pricing structure, currency and gold swaps and repurchase agreements, Open Market Committee operations, and so on.

"The light of a full and thorough audit is likely to find all kinds of cronies lurking in these dark corners of the Fed.

"And with the new, third round of quantitative easing under way, it may not be long before the money-printing game collapses entirely. At that point the calamity will compound if Americans turn to the vaults where the gold was purported to be, and find that the gold has long since been loaned out or otherwise cleaned out."

Now the real, the central, question here is just exactly how much gold is there? That is an even more important question than who has it? (the latter question being framed that way since possession, according to the old adage, is 9/10s of the law). Suppose for a moment that the amount of gold in actual existence was one or two magnitudes of order more and any number publicly bandied about. And believe me, I have seen so many different numbers in the last three months' worth of research and probing that it has left my head spinning, and those numbers, incidentally, span precisely three orders of magnitude, and each of them is from a more or less "reliable" source. In short, we may be looking at an alchemy of a wholly different sort: the production of gold-reserves on the off-ledger accounts of banks by fiat... or other means.

Obfuscated figures, in one sense, are an indicator of something very significant: fraud. And given the spread of the obfuscation over three orders of magnitude, that fraud is massive. Indeed, we should by now expect nothing less from these prime banksters and central banksters, after the derivatives bubble, LIBOR scandal, quantitative easing (what a lame euphemism guys!). Some banks - like Deutschebank - have been catching the whiff of some industrial scale fraud, and some countries - Germany and Venezuela among them - have been pressuring for the repatriation of their gold reserves, while others are buying it in massive quantities. And this leaves that obfuscation hovering over the whole affair... I don't know about you, but it has the malodorous whiff of more bankster fraud written all over it.

See you on the flip side.