Of course Turkish gold reserves are overstated -- nearly everybody's are

10:41a ET Friday, January 9, 2015

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Responding to gold researcher Koos Jansen's report yesterday about what is effectively the official remonetization of gold in Turkey, in which citizens' gold is deposited with commercial banks and then used by the banks to satisfy the reserve requirements of the Turkish central bank, moving temporarily to the central bank's books --

http://www.gata.org/node/14940

-- the Perth Mint's Bron Suchecki notes today that this falsifies the central bank's gold position, which is in turn misleadingly reported by the World Gold Council. Suchecki's commentary is headlined "WGC Overstating Turkish Gold Reserves" and is posted at his Internet site, Gold Chat, here:

http://goldchat.blogspot.com/2015/01/wgc-overstating-turkish-gold-reserv...

Suchecki's point is well taken, for it means that a lot of gold in Turkey is double-counted.

But then multiple counting of gold reserves long has been Western central bank policy and, by extension, World Gold Council policy too, since the council reports central bank gold holdings so uncritically.

For as the secret March 1999 report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund discloses, central banks conceal their gold swaps and leases precisely to deceive the gold and currency markets about their secret interventions, to trick the markets into thinking that official gold reserves are far larger than they really are, to prevent the markets from knowing how much gold has actually left central bank vaults and been injected into the market for price suppression through swaps and leases:

http://www.gata.org/node/12016

As your secretary/treasurer has observed for years, official gold reserves are the ultimate weapons of government, and the true location and disposition of central bank gold reserves are secrets far more sensitive than the location and disposition of nuclear weapons -- that most official data on gold reserves is completely bogus, concocted for a deception in which the World Gold Council is fully complicit.

The deception highlighted so valuably by Suchecki today is only a small part of the fraud.

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