The Best Case For Gold In Years: World War III

[The following post is by TDV editor-in-chief, Jeff Berwick. It appears in it's entirety in this week's edition of TDV Newsletter]

The Ukraine is a cesspool of geo-political posturing, and it poses a great danger to our society. What is going on in the Ukraine is openly admitted by mainstream media to be largely helped along by US taxpayer money via government. This involvement by the US, on Russia’s border, is really an act of war. As The Guardian wrote in 2004:

“[...]the campaign [Orange Revolution] is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes[...]The Democratic party’s National Democratic institution, the Republicn party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soro’s open society institute.”

The US-NATO military and intelligence chimera was not supposed to expand at the end of the Cold War. But it did. And this poses a problem for everybody, especially the children and unborn. The battle for the Ukraine leaves room for error and escalation, of this there can be absolutely no doubt. None.

Of course, the worst case scenario is World War III. The Pentagon and NATO for sure does not see this as an “abstract concept,” as many researchers point out.

What Might World War III look like?

As the US prepared to invade Iraq, there was a famous exercise by NATO and the US named TIRANNT, standing for Theater Iran Near Term. At that point, the media was going haywire over the military threat of Iran, and threatening pre-emptive war. TIRANNT placed Russia, China and Iran and North Korea as the foes of the west. In other words, this is who the western military alliance saw as the theoretical military alliance against them in a theoretical World War III situation. That scenario was leaked to the Washington Post. Suffice it to say World War III wouldn’t be pretty.

The Ukrainian Minister of Defense has been replaced as have key commanders of the Ukrainian forces, many of whom were dismissed. This seems like a classic coup. It must be said large sectors of the armed forces and the police there are loyal to President Yanukovych. These are the ingredients for a civil war, as many in the Crimea apparently feared from the beginning. And, of course, the purpose of the coup was to install puppets. Word of Neo-Nazi’s being placed in powerful positions is betokening of Brussels and the US desiring a political apparatus in the Ukraine which obeys orders. 

The impoverishment of the Ukrainian population via western creditors and the IMF is a sure thing. This is what the IMF means by offering aid to countries. The aid always comes with certain conditions – IMF reforms – and any aid offered to a country like Ukraine is typically needed right away to pay down debt.

So, economically, Ukraine will be inheriting more debt is all. This debt will come with conditions such as frozen wages, austerity measures and the like. Economic collapse of the Ukraine is already underway. The Ukrainian people will be totally bankrupted. And passionate fascists are in power…

Failing Diplomacy

As I type this, diplomacy is failing over the Ukraine. Already the US Department of Energy has announced that it would sell crude from the US strategic petroleum reserve. This move is geared towards undermining Russia for which high energy prices are more important than the performance of the Russian stock market. Bloomberg also reported that the US, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “has claimed that in the case of an escalation of unrest in Crimea, the US Army is ready to back up Ukraine and its allies in Europe with military actions.”

The Gold Factor

Other strange news is coming out of the Ukraine as well. This story is specious at best, but interesting nonetheless. According to the pro-Russian newspaper Iskra, Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, which subsequently took the gold to the US. From the source:

Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport.

According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.

After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.

Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.”

Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.

The folks at GATA looked into this. They asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York about Ukraine’s gold, to which the Fed replied: “Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder. You may want to contact the National Bank of Ukraine to discuss this report.”

What’s for sure is that tensions over the Ukraine have made the best case for gold in years. In fact, gold rose to a six month high on Thursday due to global economic concerns (slowdown in China) and of course worries about Russia and the US’s Ukraine standoff. Gold began to rise when Russia launched military exercises near its border with Ukraine, and data of US involvement in the Ukraine started surfacing. This trend hasn’t slowed. 

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