There's a vault with gold somewhere -- but whose vault, and whose gold?

11:08p ET Thursday, September 1, 2011

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

On CNBC today reporter Bob Pisani was shown being put in a van whose windows had been covered, being driven around London for a while, being walked through an unidentified room containing pallets of gold bars, and then being handed a bar whose serial number, ZeroHedge promptly determined (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/some-observations-bob-pisanis-visit-glds-v...), does not appear on the bar list of the inventory claimed by the sponsor of Pisani's mysterious expedition, the exchange-traded fund GLD, which had meant to dispel suspicions about its gold holdings. You can watch the CNBC report here:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000043030

For all Pisani or anyone besides his handlers knew, he could have been in the basement of the Bank of England, and the bars he saw could have belonged to the bank itself, to Ireland's Central Bank, or maybe even Venezuela's. Indeed, maybe the Venezuelan ambassador to Britain got the same tour last week, without the blindfolds, in an effort to dissuade his master back in Caracas from repatriating anything and thus making trouble for the fractional-reserve gold banking system and its gold price suppression scheme.

As the custodian for so much foreign-owned gold, the U.S. Federal Reserve may play the same sort of game at the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On Mondays the German ambassador may be invited to visit gold he is told is Germany's. On Tuesdays it may be the Italian ambassador's turn. Wednesdays may be reserved for the Swiss ambassador -- yes, even Switzerland, with its mountain fastnesses, is said to keep much of its official gold in New York. (See http://www.gata.org/node/7189.) The Belgian ambassador may visit on Thursdays, as a couple of months ago the Belgian central bank acknowledged that the location of 43 percent of its gold reserves couldn't really be determined, as that much had been lent out. (See http://www.gata.org/node/10031.) Fridays could belong to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, whose gold, while always being sold or contemplated for sale, has never actually been located either, despite questions posed to the IMF by GATA and clumsily evaded three years ago (http://www.gata.org/node/6242) and a question posed by a member of the U.S. House Committee on Domestic Monetary Policy at a hearing in June (http://www.gata.org/node/10037).

Yes, thanks to today's report on CNBC, it seems that there's gold in a vault somewhere in Britain. But whose vault is it really, and to whom does the gold really belong? How many claims are there against it?

Keeping CNBC's Pisani in the dark, the GLD people didn't answer those questions, but rather made them only more compelling. For keeping him in the dark, at the end of his report Pisani actually thanked them. We do too.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.