MORE MISSING MONEY: THE SANCTIONS-AS-FLOAT SCAM

Ok folks, you can add another $300,000,000,000 to the growing pile of missing money, according to this article shared by (and with our gratitude to) E.E.:

The EU can’t find most of Russia’s $300bn of frozen reserves

Now this story, as you can see, dates from Feb 23 of this year, and here it is, already May, and as I've read this story, for the life of me I cannot recall reading, or seeing, or hearing, anything about it until now, on any of the lamestream propatainment media of the West. Nadda. Nichts. Nothing.

But wait, there's more, and its almost comical in its breathtaking implications:

Following Moscow's military operation in Ukraine, Western countries imposed sanctions against the (Central Bank of Russia). These sanctions include freezing $300bn of Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves held in Europe and the US, as well as prohibiting all transactions related to the management of the regulator's reserves and assets, and transactions with any legal entity, organisation, or body acting on behalf or at the direction of the (Central Bank of Russia).

However, according to recent reports, the EU legal enforcement authorities have only been able to identify €33.8bn of the €250bn held in Europe, which has been frozen. The remaining funds have not been found and presumably remain under Russian control.

Last week 45 members of the European Parliament wrote to the leaders of the EU asking for a centralised registry to be created detailing where the (Central Bank of Russia) funds are held, as well as €19bn worth of frozen oligarchs' money and other sanctioned Russia citizens and companies. Delfi reports that the EU has still not been able to identify where the majority of the (Central Bank of Russia) funds are held. Moreover, they admitted the $300bn number was based on the (Central Bank of Russia’s) own reporting of the amount held in Europe and not on reports from the institutions that were supposed to hold the reserves; consequently the amount held in Europe may be a lot lower than the reported figure of $300bn.

The problems with finding these funds is a function of the complexity of how Russia manages its foreign reserves, and has proved to be more difficult to untangle than was expected.

The hunt for the cash is on. The EU ordered all member countries to order their banks to report any holdings of (Central Bank of Russia) money on February 15.

The funds have only been frozen, but technically they still belong to the (Centraal Bank of Russia). Under international law one government cannot seize another government’s property unless it declares war; the EU has repeatedly said it has no intention of declaring war on Russia. That makes seizing the $300bn of frozen funds legally very difficult.

Now, aside from the fact that all the talk about "sanctions" is so much hot air masking the fact that they really have no sound way of finding every last little kopek lurking on the ledgers of the Russian accounts in the West, the article discloses that the European Union, in yet another example of bureaucratic inefficiency and disorganization, has no one set of books dealing with Russia's accounts....

....Now, I don't know about you, but I call that extremely interesting, because behind all this assumed bureaucratic inefficiency, a multitude of dubious behavior and outright crimes might be being conducted. In Scenario 1 we would have European officials dutifully mouthing "our full support and sympathy" with "our Ukrainian partners" and with their "American masters" and with America's "policy objectives and aid" &c &c blah blah blah, while in the meantime, it's really business as usual with Russia. In short, "we can't find it because we don't want to find it and hence have not put into place any centralized mechanism to do so." In Scenario 2 a similar situation prevails, but in this case, the absence of such a centralized system or "ledger" allows those frozen assets to be accessed piecemeal and by a variety of parties - including the USSA and Russia - for their own purposes in a manner similar to how banks use the float to conduct quick off-the-books investments and gain some quick profits. In a certain way, both scenarios rely on a feature of "sanctions" that most people do not notice, or if they do, they really do not think about: sanctions regimes and policies are a way to use someone else's assets and deposits to make money; it's a way to extend the period of a float more or less indefinitely. While Russia's money is supposedly frozen (in accounts you supposedly can't find), you can use that money unbeknownst to others, to make more money, or for whatever other purpose or agenda you have in mind.

Call it the "Sanctions-as-Float" Scam, the latest in the Central Banksters' seemingly bottomless bag of dirty tricks.

Would "they" actually do such a thing?

Well, rather than answer that question directly, I advance Scenario 3 as a possible high-octane answer: if you're willing to do all that Scenarios 1 and 2 imply, then why not simply shift the money in those accounts to the Ukraine in the form of "aid"? I'll grant that it's nasty, but it's just the sort of nasty that Mr. Globalooney would like: finance a war against Russia with Russia's own money. After all, they've been at war with the western middle class for decades, and financing that war with the middle class's own money in the form of taxes, inflation, and other schemes (think central bank digital currency). I wouldn't put any of this past them.  It's wild, it's crazy, it's virtually impossible to pull off without being caught at some point. But I don't put it past them.  It goes without saying that when one reaches this point, people will abandon trust in the systems and people advocating it.

And that is what we also see happening in fact. It's that fact that is so disturbing, because it may be an indicator that others are coming up with similar wild and woolly scenarios, and are taking the steps to minimize their exposure to the risks involved in financial dealing with the criminally insane. They're pulling their money out - and not buying the securities - of a systemically corrupt and untrustworthy system.

See you on the flip side...