GERMAN GOLD, ALLIED BOMBS, AND A BIT OF THE MOVIES

So many people found this story that I have to talk about it. In fact, if you've been following the whole increasingly odd story of the German gold repatriation, it just took probably the most bizarre turn yet, and this is a story that started out being odd and bizarre! Now, if you've been following this story as others and I have over the years, you'll have run across a number of these "odd oddities," things like former Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht being told that the New York Federal Reserve could not find Germany's gold, when Herr Schacht was visiting his central banking friend Benjamin Strong in New York in 1928. Herr Schacht, according to his memoirs Confessions of the Old Wizard, informs us that he blandly smiled at Mr. Strong and said simply that he knew the Fed was "good for it." Then Herr Schacht received a sentence so light at Nuremberg after World War Two that many have speculated he blackmailed the Allies somehow, and I cannot help but entertain the notion that his little encounter with "misplaced" German gold in the NY Fed in 1928 may have had something to do with that.

Fast forward to the late 20th century and early 21st century, and we get the gold-backed bearer bonds scandals, and the Bruce Willis-Samuel Jackson movie Die Hard with a Vengeance. The movie came along first, in which we encounter an ex-East German Army officer and a group of nouveau Euro-fascists pretending to be terrorists setting off bombs all over New York City, while their real objective is to loot the gold depository of the NY Federal Reserve of every last ingot of gold. The title of the movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance, indicates a relationship to the first movie in the Die Hard series, where Willis battles "Hans" the brother of the third movie's ex-East German Army officer, Simon Gruber. Hans, unlike his brother Simon, is trying to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of bearer bonds that are locked within the vault of a Japanese firm's headquarters in Los Angeles.

It has always struck me as very odd that these movies appeared somewhat in advance of the reality that they so peculiarly mimic, for of course, the bearer-bonds scandals broke when two Japanese men were apprehended by Italy's Garda di Finanze on the Swiss-Italian border, trying to enter Switzerland. Tucked into a false bottom of their briefcase were $134.5 billion dollars of allegedly "gold-backed" bearer bonds. The scandal wouldn't go away, and president Obama had to answer a question during a press conference that pointed out this was the exact amount in the Troubled Asset Relief Fund. Mr Obama assured everyone that the bonds were fakes and counterfeits. Nothing to see here. Move along. Then after this, the two Japanese men, were released by Italian authorities(!) after having allegedly some role in the counterfeiting scheme of the century, while Vatican-connected news outlets in East Asia were informing everyone that the "fakes" were so good they appeared to be "genuine." Well, of course the bonds were fake because they were in denominations of a billion dollars each, we were told, and the US Treasury has never issue bonds in those denominations. Well, one doesn't counterfeit seven dollar bills either, and no amount of academic footsie and polysyllabilified explanations has ever given an explanation of why people would want to run a scam - over and over as it turns out - counterfeiting things that don't exist and in such astronomical amounts of money that even at extreme discount they would be difficult to unload. (And I'm still waiting for that explanation.)

As all of these weird gold-backed bearer bonds stories were breaking, Germany suddenly decided it wanted to repatriate its gold reserves from Paris, London, and New York. Initially, we were told, this repatriation proceeded slowly, then the story sort of dropped out of view, and then, voila! it was announced just a few weeks ago that what had started out at a snail's pace had been "accelerated" and all of Germany's gold was safe and sound back in vaults in Frankfurt-am-Main, danke Gott! And just in the nick of time too, to have some reserves handy for all those immigrants and refugees  Frau Merkel wants to continue flooding Germany with, and who will need welfare until she and Darth Soros can find them steady jobs raping German women and producing Sharia-compliant clothing for the whole German female population so that they can avoid being this insensitive to Islam in the future.

But alas! All that gold may suddenly (once again) have to be moved to safe havens elsewhere because, lo and behold, we have the sudden discovery of an unexploded 2,000 pound bomb, left over from World War Two, which could, if it detonates, flatten an entire city block:

Vault Containing $70 Billion In German Gold To Be Evacuated As Frankfurt Defuses Massive Bomb

Note, first, the size of the bomb(a British bomb), and the amount of people to be evacuated:

Approximately 60,000 residents of Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurt, will be ordered to evacuate their homes on Sunday as the city's emergency service staff will attempt to defuse a massive World War Two bomb, discovered recently at a local building site. The 1.4-tonne HC 4000 bomb dropped by the British air force during World War Two was uncovered on a building site on Wismarer Strasse in Frankfurt’s leafy Westend where many wealthy bankers live.

And here's the culpr...er... the bomb itself:

The Bomb...er... Canopy OVER the Bomb in Frankfurt

Now, fortunately, I don't have to indulge in any high octane speculation today, because Zero Hedge is suspecting the same thing that you probably are, and that I definitely am:

Where this otherwise trivial evacuation takes on a more sinister, "Die Harder" spin, is when looking at what other structures are impacted by the 1.5 km evacuation radius: these include Frankfurt’s Goethe University, police headquarters, two hospitals, transport systems... oh and the Bundesbank headquarters, which as a reminder ten days ago completed the accelerated repatriation of 674 tonnes of gold - some three years ahead of schedule - from New York and Paris to its vault deep underground.

According to Reuters, the Bundesbank vault which stores 1,710 tonnes of gold deep underground - approximately half the country’s reserves - is located less than 600 meters from the location of the bomb. Well, that particular vault which now holds $70 billion in gold (including $28 billion in freshly repatriated physical) and everything around it, is about to be evacuated. All that's missing are several dozen dump trucks to take advantage of the massive evacuation that will leave thousands of gold bars without security for 1.5 kilometers in any direction.

In fact, in case you didn't catch the reference to the Die Hard with a Vengeance movie, the article references it more directly:

Still, to prevent anyone from getting any ideas of following in Simon Gruber's footsteps, a spokesman for the German Bundesbank said, that "the usual security arrangements" would remain in place while experts worked to disarm the bomb.

Simon Gruber, of course, being the ex-East German army officer determined to steal the New York Fed's gold bullion, and avenge his bearer-bond-stealing brother Hans, who died at the end of the first movie. (Oh, did we mention that he fell out of a window of a high rise skyscraper?)

Now, assurances from the Bundesbank spokesman aside, I cannot help but "feel" here that something is odd and amiss. Granted, there's no evidence for this, there's nothing to suggest this is anything more than an "irrational" feeling, a bit of odd coincidence and synchronicity with some very odd Bruce Willis movies that seem to feature a 50% presence(when you factor all four movies) of very upset Germans planning some very sophisticated covert operations involving gold bullion and bearer bonds.

Which brings me to my high octane speculation of the day:

World War Two and unexploded bombs are, perhaps, a handy and convenient thing to have around if one wants to divert the attention of the residents of a very large city, forcibly evacuate them from the financial district, while perhaps swapping out all those recently recovered bars of...well, what we're told are gold... and replace them with something else, if they're real, then a few fake replacements, or vice versa, if they're fake, with a few real ones...

... you get the idea. And once this is done, then, well, commence a rehypothecation! In fact, if this was the scheme all along, then what, really, is under that canopy? A real bomb already defused quietly prior to the big evacuation exercise? And, while we're at it, yea a two thousand pound bomb will do a lot of damage, but an evacuation radius of 1.5 kilometers, that's a little over a mile, is much larger than the severe blast damage range of such a bomb. Why such a big evacuation area? I could understand such a large if this bomb were, say, one of the enormous British 10,000 pound blockbuster or 25,000 pound "grand Slam" bombs, the so called "earthquake" bombs.

And that, of course, makes me wonder... why hide that bomb under a canopy at all? After all, the general "look" of a World War Two bomb is known to just about anyone who's ever seen an old newsreel of Germans or the British bombing whomever. There's no big secret about a conventional World War Two bomb, British or otherwise. And if that bomb should detonate, that canopy isn't going to shield anyone from anything. So again, why hide the bomb? The large evacuation area, canopies... all this suggests to me that something is quite amiss with this story, and that whatever it is they're really doing, they don't want anyone to see. Heavy construction equipment rolls in; heavy construction equipment rolls out, perhaps taking a secret cargo - like Simon Gruber in Die Hard with a Vengeance - out.

See you on the flip side...