GERMANY WANTS ITS GOLD BACK… AGAIN

About a decade ago  - 2015-2016 to be precise - you might recall that I was blogging a lot about Germany's attempt to repatriate its gold. In fact, if you go to the search engine on the front page of this website and just search for "German gold" all sorts of my blogs about the subject will pop up.  There are so many they are too numerous to list here. For those who may not remember,  or who may have become regular readers of this website since then, Germany was then attempting to repatriate its gold from western reserve banks that held large stocks of that country's gold reserves, estimated to be the second largest holdings in the world after the USA's. The gold being targeted for repatriation was about a third of that country's holdings in Paris, in London (in the Bank of England) and in the New York Federal Reserve vaults.  As the story developed, Germany did indeed repatriate some of that gold, but then suspicions began to emerge in the press - for reasons never entirely made clear - that the gold repatriated may not have been of assay quality but less-than-pure coin melt gold, and demands began to surface in the independent German media for an audit and full accounting of the gold thus repatriated. This the Bundesbank never really managed to do, issuing a few unsatisfactory reports, and there the matter fizzled and sizzled until, eventually, the story was dropped.

But now it is back, or rather, echoes of it are back, because some in Germany want to repatriate that country's gold reserves held by the USA.  Here's that story shared by S.C.G. (with our thanks);

Germany’s Conservatives Sound the Alarm Over Gold Reserves in the US Germany keeps over €100 billion worth of gold reserves in the New York Federal Reserve

The article puts this most  recent call for the return of Germany's gold precisely in the context of of the attempts to do so about a decade ago:

According to a report published by The Telegraph, Germany is considering removing an enormous stockpile of gold from a vault in New York over worries about Donald Trump’s unpredictable policies.

For decades, Berlin has stashed 1,200 tons of its famous gold reserves, the second largest on the planet after those of the United States, in a vault deep underground at the US Federal Reserve in Manhattan.

Now, senior figures from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, which is set to lead the next German government, have discussed removing it from New York because of concerns that Washington is no longer a reliable partner, the Bild newspaper has reported.

“Of course, the question has arisen again,” Marco Wanderwitz, a former German government minister who gave up his CDU seat in the Bundestag this year, told Bild.

According to The Telegraph, Wanderwitz has long advocated for a policy that would allow German officials to regularly inspect the gold – or for withdrawing it completely.

He has previously lobbied to visit the gold reserves and personally inspect them, but his request was rejected in 2012.

Germany’s riches were earned after World War Two, when exports surged resulting in large trade surpluses with other nations.

These surpluses were converted into gold under the Bretton Woods system.

Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament for the CDU, said that he was also in favour of German officials being allowed to personally inspect the bullion.

“I demand regular checks of Germany’s gold reserves. Official representatives of the Bundesbank must personally count the bars and document their results,” he said.

In other words, some German leaders want a full accounting of the gold, and that requires full access to it, which, by implication, they are not getting, and hence, they want the gold physically returned to German soil, not stashed in a vault in the New York Federal Reserve, which, as regular readers here know, has a bad habit of misplacing Germany's gold, because it did so in 1928 during the visit of Germany's Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht to New York.  If you do not know the story, it is briefly recorded in Schacht's personal memoirs written after World War Two. The governor of the New York Federal Reserve gave Schacht a tour of the gold vaults of the bank. Schacht asked to see Germany's gold, and the staff went off in search of it, and came back with a rather unsettling report: they could not find Germany's gold! Schacht, ever one to drop subtle messages and hints, records that he smiled at the New York Federal Reserve governor Mr. Strong, and said simply, "That's ok, I know you're good for it." Nod nod, wink wink.

So problems in the New York Federal Reserve with Germany's gold are nothing new. In fact, they're now about a whole century old (Schacht reports that the incident occurred in 1928). Now we have an American president who is imposing tariffs on Europe, including Germany, and in such a system, gold clearing is a standard component. And the same administration also has been making noises about a full audit of the American gold reserves alleged to be in Fort Knox.

I say alleged, because no one knows for certain if there is, indeed, any gold actually there, and if there is, what quality it is, since no audit has ever really been done. There was a so-called audit back in the early 1970s, but as anyone who has researched that incident will inform you, that was a highly questionable audit, for the "auditors" were not permitted to select any vault at random, but had to assay the bars in a vault pre-selected for them, and so on. As far as the other vaults were concerned, they could have been completely empty, and no one on the "audit" team would have been the wiser.

So stop and ponder what we have: at the beginning of the German gold story arc, we have a statement by the president of the German Reichsbank that in 1928, the New York Federal Reserve could not locate Germany's gold, and his own statement that he knew the American bank was "good for it," which is a nice polite banker's way of saying that he knew that Germany's gold had been re-hypothecated to other use. At the end of this story arc, we have inadequate audits of Fort Knox, reimposition of tariffs on Europe by the USA, calls for a real audit of Fort Knox, and all of a sudden, the same German leaders as demanded the repatriation of some of that country's gold a decade ago reasserting the same demand in the current 'geopolifinancial" context. (I coined the term "geopolifinancial" in my upcoming book TheRialto In Richmond Reconstructed as a means to show the tight interplay of the deep states, deep events, geopolitics, and deep finance in the post-Civil War period in the USA.)

So what does all of this add up to?

My high octane speculation of the day is that someone in Germany knows that all the talk globally about a return to "sound money" that is "bullion backed" - and especially all that talk about "bullion-backed" electronic transfer systems and bullion backed crypto-"currencies" and so on - is codswallop and bilge water.  The whole system has become an inverted pyramid, standing on the point of bullion, and expanding (or rather, ballooning) upward to a massive system with too much paper, much of it very bad (remember all those derivatives no one is talking about any more?). Under a "sound money" scheme, one can try to redeem all that paper at par - a daunting task because there's not enough bullion, silver or gold, on the entire planet to do so, necessitating that we go out and seize one of those mineral-rich asteroids to be able to cover all that bad paper (or at least, claim that we've grabbed one of those asteroids), or one can revalue all that paper so the current bullion reserves are adequate. But the bottom line is, to do either, one must have physical possession of the bullion.  Someone would appear to be wanting to expose all the fraud, just at precisely the time that the presumed incoming Federal Chancellor, Herr Merz, is talking about a massive expansion of the German military.  A substantial gold reserve would be kind of handy for that too (and a big military to protect it.)

In other words, it's as if, almost exactly a century later, the ghost of Herr Schacht is back, and he's saying, "It's not ok... because I don't think you're good for it any more...."

So now the question is, to whom did we "lose" Germany's gold?

See you on the flip side...

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