Germany’s Gold Remains a Mystery as Mainstream Media Cheer Leads

by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

On 9 February 2017, the Deutsche Bundesbank issued an update on its extremely long-drawn-out gold repatriation program, an update in which it claimed to have transferred 111 tonnes of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Germany during 2016, while also transferring an additional 105 tonnes of gold from the Banque de France in Paris to Germany during the same time-period.

Following these assumed gold bar movements, the Bundesbank now claims to have achieved its early 2013 goal of repatriating 300 tonnes of gold from New York to Frankfurt, but after 4 years it is still 91 tonnes short of its planned transfer of 374 tonnes of gold from Paris to Frankfurt. In essence, over an entire 4-year period (i.e. 208 weeks), the Bundesbank has only been able to transfer 583 tonnes of gold back from New York and Paris to Germany. And the Bundesbank still claims to have 1236 tonnes of gold remaining in storage with the New York Fed.

Predictably, instead of prompting the mainstream financial media into asking why these supposed gold bar movements have taken so long, the Bundesbank press release threw the mainstream media into a frenzy of immediately back-slapping the Bundesbank while regurgitating its press release with articles such as “Germany brings its gold stash home sooner than planned” from Reuters , “Germany Gets Its Gold Back Faster With Job Seen Done in 2017” from Bloomberg, and “Germans Sent Gold Away to Keep It From the Soviets. Now Much of It Is Back” from the New York Times.

Furthermore, if the mainstream financial media had bothered looking at Federal Reserve “Table 3.13 – Selected Foreign Official Assets Held at Federal Reserve Banks” under ‘Earmarked Gold’ (line item 4), they would have seen that the foreign custody gold figure that the Fed reports has not changed since September 2016, and that the Fed’s foreign custody gold figure had dropped by 113 tonnes between March 2016 and September 2016, meaning that the Bundesbank’s 111 tonne gold transfer from the US to Germany had been completed by September 2016, i.e. at least 4 months before the Bundesbank reported it.

100 tonnes of gold per day Air-Lifted

All gold withdrawals from the Fed’s “earmarked gold” reporting category in 2016 occurred between March and September 2016, with activity each month throughout that period except in May. As to why there were gold withdrawals from the Fed of 113.45 tonnes when the Bundesbank only reported transferring back 111 tonnes is not clear. Was an additional amount withdrawn from the Fed vault by another foreign central bank or did the Bundesbank conduct further melting down of its US Assay office gold bars and lose 2+ tonnes (1.7%) of fine ounce content that was overstated in its Federal Reserve holdings? Or perhaps this amount was lost when weighing old US Assay Office ‘melts’ (batches of 18-22 bars) which had never been properly weighed before.

Whatever the case, we will never know because the Fed does not divulge the identities of its central bank gold custody customers, nor does the Bundesbank divulge simple details such as gold bar serial numbers on its so-called gold bar list (more of which below).

Simple common sense would have alerted the mainstream media robots to the fact that it is not normal for international gold movements to take 4 years to complete, and that there is something absolutely not right with Germany’s foreign held gold taking so long to transport from New York and Paris. Paris is just a 1 hour flight from Frankfurt and 6 hours by road, and New York is less than 9 hours flying time to Frankfurt.

Other simple questions which the mainstream financial media have failed to ask or have failed to think of include why does the Bundesbank need to keep any gold at all stored at the Federal Reserve in New York, let alone 1236 tonnes, when the New York Fed vault is not even an international gold trading center. And is this gold left in New York is under any liens, claims, encumbrances, loans or swaps?

In contrast to the Bundesbank’s laughable repatriation program duration, take for example, the Banco Central do Venezuela, which was able to transfer 160 tonnes of gold from Europe to Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, over a 2 month period from 25 November 2011 to 30 January 2012. See “Venezuela’s Gold Reserves – Part 2: From Repatriation to Reactivation” for details.

That’s 80 tonnes per month, which would equate to a 4 month transfer window for 300 tonnes of the Bundesbank’s gold stored in New York, not 4 years. Furthermore, why is the mainstream media not asking the Bundesbank why it takes more than 4 years to transfer 374 tonnes of gold from Paris to Frankfurt?

More damning to the contemporary Bundesbank, the same Americans (Federal Reserve) were able to fly over 800 tonnes of gold from the US to England exactly 50 year ago, in November and December 1967, to prop up their share of the London Gold Pool gold holdings at the Bank of England. This gold was flown into RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk over 9 days in batches of around 100 tonnes each day using US air force cargo carriers, and then this gold was ferried by police escorted convoys down to the City of London.

The first 4 of these US air force flights were on Tuesday 28 November 1967, Wednesday 29 November, Friday 1 December, and Sunday 3 December, with the Americans flying in 100 tonnes of gold each day to RAF Mildenhall over those 4 days. That’s 400 tonnes of gold flown from the US to Europe in just 6 days. See screenshot below.

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