Submitted by Tyler Durden: Over the past several years, the German
people, for a variety of justified reasons, have expressed a pressing
desire to have their central bank perform a test, verification,
validation or any other assay, of the official German gold
inventory, which at 3,395 tonnes is the second highest in the world,
second only to the US. We have italicized the word official because
this representation is merely on paper: the problem arises because no
member of the general population, or even elected individuals, have been
given access to observe this gold. The problem is exacerbated when one
considers that a majority of the German gold is held offshore, primarily
in the vaults of the New York Fed, and at the Bank of England - the two
historic centers of central banking activity in the post World War 2
world.
Recently, the topic of German gold resurfaced following the
disclosure that early on in the Eurozone creation process, the
Bundesbank secretly withdrew two-thirds of its gold, or 940 tons, from
London in 2000, leaving just 500 tons with the Bank of England. As we made it very clear, what was most odd about this event, is that the Bundesbank did something it had every right to do fully in the open:
i.e., repatriate what belongs to it for any number of its own reasons -
after all the German central bank is only accountable to its people (or
so the myth goes), in deep secrecy. The question was why it opted for
this stealthy transfer.This immediately prompted rampant speculation within various media outlets, the most fanciful of which, of course, being that the Bundesbank never had any gold to begin with and has been masking the absence all along. The problem with such speculation is that, while it may be 100% correct and accurate, there has been not a shred of hard evidence to prove it.