SWITZERLAND’S QUIET GOLD EARTHQUAKE

This story was shared by S.D., with our gratitude, because when I read it, I knew we're looking possibly at one of the most significant financial moves in recent memory: Switzerland is abandoning the London Bullion Market Association, which is basically much of the world's over-the-counter bullion trading, and moving much of its gold smelting capacity to the USA:

SWISS RELOCATION SIGNALS LBMA ABANDONMENT

You'll note that this short article occurs in a context of other articles about the de-industrialization of Western Europe, the re-industrialization of North America, talk about the Federal Reserve revaluating gold reserves, Trump's tariffs, not to mention Western Europe's crazy and lunatic policies:

Degrowth ideology, WEF agendas, immigration strains, and energy policy dysfunction are accelerating Europe’s deindustrialization. Switzerland’s willingness to relocate confirms this shift. It is a clear signal of both U.S. gravitational pull and EU fragility.

“The next bright-white flight… will be out of Europe and into the U.S.”

This observation maps business relocation, elite and capital migration. When capital leaves, political influence and strategic pricing power follow. For gold, this means potential pricing mechanisms move back to the U.S., ending centuries of Western European dominance.

Note that one predicted effect will be the flight of "bright white Europeans" from the continent to America, a kind of Europe-wide version of the "brain drain" experienced by Great Britain during the 1970s, as professional and academic Britons fled to more welcoming business and academic environments in North America and Australia.

Beyond this, there is another crucial bombshell in the article about the effects that the Swiss move may have, and ponder this one long and hard for its long-term implications for US fiscal and monetary policy:

Refining dictates certification. Certification dictates deliverability. Deliverability affects futures convergence and arbitrage. This domino structure cannot be underestimated in terms of pricing influence. It is a nod to gold’s growing importance to US policy.

And at the end of the next article we find this:

This professional, slightly dismissive tone reveals more than it conceals. Revaluing gold introduces market discipline, something incompatible with unrestrained fiat issuance. It also decentralizes control from the Fed to the Treasury.

...

However, once revaluation is enacted, the asset becomes politically toxic for Gov’t to sell to retire the actual debt. The government would likely hedge, but physical sales would become controversial. This kind of cements the asset’s status as a balance sheet anchor rather than a liquidity tool.

The Fed recognizes that revaluation represents a sort of paradigm shift in the monetary regime. The U.S. Treasury, not the Fed, would wield increasing power. That shift cannot occur without institutional friction.

In other words, you're looking at very long term policy decisions - decisions that will long outlast Mr. Trump's or even his successor's administrations. But there's something else: if all this should prove to be true, then that "revaluation" that is strongly being hinted will occur, with, or without, the Federal Reserve's acquiescence or approval. That in turn means something else: the Fed's own "currency" will also be "revalued" eventually, and whether the Fed wants it to be or not, and as a result of that, the post-Civil War choices will again become front and center topics: convertibility, re-monetization of gold, re-monetization of silver, and an overall deflationary trend might again be the topics consuming policy discussions for much of the century.  If Switzerland's moves eventually transpire, those discussions in one form or another are all but an inevitability.  As the US Treasury resumes a more important role vis-a-vis the Fed, its own role in currency production will again assume significance (when, for example, was the last time you actually spent a United States Note in cash transactions? My bet is, most of you haven't even seen a United States Note, much less spend one; they're the paper currency with a red Treasury seal on the front, not a green one. And the reason you haven't seen one is that the Fed, when it came across them in its day-today dealings, deliberately withdrew and destroyed them. And by the way, John Kennedy was the last president under which they were issued and circulated...)

I raise the potentiality of these inevitabilities because they will, in turn, be used as "crises of opportunity" to stampede everyone into a false, fraudulent, and phony form of "gold" (and possibly even silver) monetization: the use of electronic transfer and convertibility systems. Don't fall for it: demand the continuation of paper notes to preserve transactional privacy and security, and the actual ability to actually use physical gold and silver in any and all transactions.

Otherwise, it's the same old game, on steroids: we'll give you nothing, and you give us your hard assets. To put it somewhat differently, the Bretton Woods system and its post-Nixon aftermath are indeed over, but... "they" want to keep that system going for the bulk of the public, while they operate in a system of hard assets behind a one-way mirror, exchanging real and really convertible certificates of deposit.  There's a reason, folks, that those old one hundred thousand dollar bill were gold certificates, and only circulated among Federal Reserve Banks, while the same acts and executive orders that created it, made the private ownership of gold bullion or specie illegal. (Or to put it differently, the $100,000 gold certificate is itself proof of the existence of a secret system of finance, of a two-tiered system, one private, the other public.)

Which brings us to a final point: you know they're up to something, because amid all this talk of revaluation and the Swiss moving their smelting operations to the USA, no one seems to be talking about the other crucial component: how much gold does the United States actually have? What is its assay purity?

And to answer those questions - and to make any such system work -  one has to have trust, and trust can only be had by answering those questions. And those questions, in turn, cannot be answered without ... an open and transparent audit of those gold reserves. In short, even that secret two-tiered system is no longer sustainable. Why? Because nations are demanding repatriation of their gold? Why are they demanding it? Because they suspect the amounts and assay purity are being obfuscated.

It's about to get very interesting, and for a very long time. Take a look at that one hundred thousand dollar bill, and ponder its implications carefully. Note: no greenbacks for us bankers here (again, we bankers get the hard assets, you people get monetized debt and green pieces of paper). Indeed, it's not a greenback at all:

See you on the flip side...

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