Gold

Gold  (chemical element)
Interest of	• Cryptogon • Dollar Vigilante • Paul Volcker • Zero Hedge
The 79th element. A very dense, soft, malleable and ductile metal which has been desired by many people in many cultures for its ornamental value and for trading.

Gold has been used as a currency for thousands of years. It has been used throughout history either as physical coinage or as solid cornerstone for stable paper currencies. Up until 1913, most Western societies prospered and grew steadily and naturally under a monetary standard with at least partial gold backing. The gradual abandonment of the gold backing throughout the 20^th century and the ultimate delinkage of all currencies from gold in 1971 is the fundamental cause of the ongoing inflation (the US-Dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1913) as well as the main reason for the global financial crises since 2007.

The Gold Standard

The US left the gold standard (that is, abandoned its earlier policy of maintaining a fixed exchange rate between gold and the US Dollar) on August 15, 1971. Some currencies remained pegged to gold for some years after, but as of 2017, there are no currencies backed by gold, so that they can be produced in unlimited amounts by central banks. The price of gold appears to have been subject to complex and systematic fixing by influential insiders since 1971.

Private gold holdings

Advise by investing professionals to private investors is "gold provides insurance for your portfolio, and we believe that most people should probably allocate around 5%-15% of their portfolios to gold or gold-related investments."

Uzbekistan

Beginning in November 2020, the central bank of Uzbekistan started to sell sealed gold bars with a QR-code for real time verification, to stimulate gold use as a store of value and promote the circulation of gold.

Reserves

Gold reserves re distributed in approximate proportion to GDP.

“In President Wilson's era it was impossible to conceive that the role of gold could ever cease. In President Clinton's era it is impossible for policy makers to visualize that gold has any role at all.”
Anthony Sutton

Yamashita's gold

Yamashita's gold, also referred to as the Yamashita treasure, is the name given to the alleged war loot stolen in Southeast Asia by Imperial Japanese forces during World War II and hidden in caves, tunnels, underground complexes, or just underground in the Philippines. It is named after the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, nicknamed "The Tiger of Malaya".

Prominent among those who have argued for the existence of Yamashita's gold are Sterling Seagrave and his wife Peggy Seagrave, who wrote two books related to the subject: The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family (2000) and Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold (2003). The Seagraves contend that looting was organized on a massive scale, by both yakuza gangsters such as Yoshio Kodama, and the highest levels of Japanese society, including Emperor Hirohito. The looting included the sack of the Chinese capital Nanking in 1937, when Japan took 6,600 tons of gold.

The Japanese government intended that loot from Southeast Asia would finance Japan's war effort. The Seagraves allege that Hirohito appointed his brother, Prince Yasuhito Chichibu, to head a secret organization named Kin no yuri ("Golden Lily"), for this purpose. The Seagraves and others have claimed that American military intelligence operatives, including Edward Lansdale, located much of the loot; they colluded with Hirohito and other senior Japanese figures to conceal its existence, and they used it to finance American covert intelligence operations around the world during the Cold War.

On orders from Washington, Lansdale supervised the recovery of several Golden Lily vaults, inventoried the bullion, and had it trucked to warehouses at the US Naval base at Subic Bay or the Air Force base at Clark Field. According to the Seagraves, two members of Stimson’s staff, together with financial experts from the newly formed CIA deposited the gold in 176 reliable banks in 42 different countries. These deposits were made in his own name or in one of his numerous aliases in order to keep the identity of the true owners secret. Once the gold was in their vaults, the banks would issue certificates that are even more negotiable than money, being backed by gold itself. With this seemingly inexhaustible source of cash, the CIA set up slush funds to influence politics in Japan, Greece, Italy, Britain and many other places around the world. For example, money from what was called the ‘M-Fund’ (named after Major-General William Marquat of MacArthur’s staff) was secretly employed to pay for Japan’s initial rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War, since the Japanese Diet itself refused to appropriate money for the purpose.

Taiwan

In 1948, the president of the Kuomintang (KMT) government, Chiang Kai-shek, was losing the civil war in northeast China against the Communists. He began planning a retreat to Taiwan and to take the national gold reserves with him. When the removal became known, it lead to a total collapse in the Chines currency and a bank collapse. Estimates of how much was moved differ between sources, ranging from between 113.6 and 115.2 tons. Since 1949, Taiwan also has been a safe haven for superrich overseas Chinese who dominate the Southeast Asian economies to keep their wealth offshore, a big part of it in gold.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2011 Attacks on Libya	“Gaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. This gold was intended to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide Francophone Africa with an alternative to the CFA."”	Ellen Brown	14 March 2016
J. P. Morgan	“... [credit] is an evidence of banking, but it [credit] is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.”	J.P. Morgan & Co. J. P. Morgan
Petrodollar	“Money supply and debt have exploded in the absence of gold convertibility [...] Today's money is not backed by gold. It is now backed by nothing at all, except our trust in the monetary system.”	Smithy	2003

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Frenzy in the Gold Market: The Repatriation of Germany’s Post World War II Gold Reserves	article	27 January 2014	Michel Chossudovsky	An overview of Germany's decision to repatriate it's physical gold bullion holdings, currently stored in the US, UK and France - they hope.
Document:Gold Smoke and Mirrors	blog post	25 March 2010	Peter	The murky world of gold custodianship, trading and gold price suppression.
Document:Meeting Note Moscow Stock Exchange Forum	seminar description	12 June 2017	Integrity Initiative	II, probably Victor Madeira or Perry Fawcett, attended a Russian business forum in London
Document:The Spoils of War	article	2002	David Guyatt	An introduction to the murky subject of the gold plundered by the NAZI and Japanese militaries during World War II and what happened to it.
File:Gold-Tungsten-Genesis.pdf	report	April 2010	Rob Kirby Financial Sense	Report on just one incident of ostensibly "Good Delivery" gold bars - 60 metric tonnes of them - stored at an asian depository, that turned out to be 95% Tungsten. Oops!

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Weblinks

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) - Chris Powell: Gold market manipulation: Why, how, and how long?