E.G., K.L. and M.W. spotted this one(and a BIG thank you to them).

Before we get to it, I have to confess to a little bit of "I-told-you-so-ism" with this article, because over the past few years and months as banks, and then central banks beginning with the Bank of England started talking about gold-backed crypto-currencies, my immediate thought was, "Oh, they've rehypothecated it so much, that they need a way to keep that permanently secret." Call it collateral fraud, you know, like taking out mortgages on non-existent buildings in vacant lots, or claiming that you have someone's gold when you do not, as in the Schacht-Strong Affair of 1928, or putting tungsten inside gold coins, as recently was discovered in Canada.

This article indicates that there could be a few teensy tiny problems with the U.S.A.'s gold reserves and their audits:

US Official Gold Reserves Auditor Caught Lying

First, let us note the author of the article's allegedly less-than-warm reception:

My journey started in 2014, when I first discovered—in contrast to what I was accustomed to reading on blogs and in newspapers—that the US official gold reserves are audited every year. I published an article on my discoveries, titled A First Glance At US Official Gold Reserves Audits, which was basically a summary of all publicly available documents about the audits. Logically, these documents present a narrative that looks to be credible at the surface, but I found some questions left unanswered, and wrote in my article “this post will be part one of a series.” (Little did I know what I got myself into.) Given the importance of the subject, I intended to submit FOIA requests at the US government, in an open-minded attempt to have my concerns removed. Since 2014 I have been prosecuting the US government. I have emailed staff of all related institutions—the US Treasury, The Office of Inspector General of the Treasury, the US Mint, and National Archives—that were initially replied, but as I got closer to the details, ceased altogether. I have submitted several dozen FOIA requests to all related institutions, some of which were honored, some not. In search of answers, I repeatedly called the Inspector General. In one of those calls, my contact simply hung up while I was talking. This incident is emblematic of this whole investigation.

The author continues by observing that yet another method to put him off the trail was to charge outrageous sums for his FOIA requests.

In other words, in the trust and transparency department, we're off to a very poor start.

Then the bombshells begin. The author notes these audits were begun in 1971, with the objective of auditing all of America's deep storage gold at West Point, the Denver Mint, Fort Knox, and the NY Federal Reserve, and that the sealing of the vaults after the audit and test assays was a crucial component:

He then recounts how former Congressman Ron Paul, one of the backers of the unpassed Gold Transparency Act, had spurred a congressional committee to dig into the gold matter (no pun intended). The testimony of the US Treasury's then-inspector general is cited:

The current auditor of the US monetary gold is the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). Representing the OIG, Eric M. Thorson attended the congressional hearing for the Gold Transparency Act (not enacted) that was initiated by Ron Paul in 2011. Mr. Thorson’s testimony at the hearing serves as the official statement by the government on the audits. Having weighed his words carefully, Thorson spoke under oath: … 100 percent of the U.S. Government’s gold reserves in the custody of the Mint has been inventoried and audited. … I can say that without any hesitation, because I have observed the gold and the security of the gold reserves myself. … the Committee for Continuing Audit of the U.S. Government-owned Gold [The Committee that started the audits] performed annual audits of Treasury’s gold reserves from 1974[*] to 1986. … by 1986, 97 percent of the Government-owned gold held by the Mint had been audited and placed under joint seal. So once you have done that, and that seal remains unbroken, then I am not sure what other benefit there would be to going back into it at that point. … Since 1993, when we [OIG] assumed responsibility for the audit, my office has continued to directly observe the inventory and test the gold. In fact, my auditors signed the official joint seals … placed on those compartments, inventoried and tested in their presence. At the end of Fiscal Year of 2008, all 42 compartments had been audited by … the Committee for Continuing Audit of the U.S. Government-owned Gold, or my office, and placed under official joint seals. Thus, in summary: From 1974 until 1986, 97 percent of the gold at the Mint had been verified by the Committee for Continuing Audit.

In 1993 the OIG became responsible for the audits, and by 2008 all compartments had been verified and sealed. The conclusions we derive from Thorson’s testimony: From 1987 until 1992, there were no audits.

From 1993 until 2008, the remaining 3 percent of the gold was verified.

But as the article continues, the seals on several vaults were opened, when the US Mint did its own audit. This, observes the author, is more-than-fishy, since the US Mint is merely a custodian for the US Treasury. It is, he says, a little bit like a bank auditing it's clients assets, or better, opening its safety deposit boxes and seeing what's inside. In any case, these audit seals were never to be broken, but in fact, they were. When the Treasury Inspector General was asked about this, he offered the explanation that it is necessary to do so when gold is moved from one vault to another. We'll get back to that one, because it's a huge clue in my opinion as to what may be going on. But, it's also a whopper doozie of a high octane speculation. The author handles this point in the following way:

The issue isn’t whether it’s possible to re-open a compartment. Gold inside a compartment that can never be opened again has no value. You might as well put it in a rocket a blast it into the sun. The point is that barring legitimate reasons to re-open a compartment (e.g., selling the metal inside), they should remain closed.) Conclusion Altogether, the vast majority of Deep Storage vault compartments have been re-opened for dubious reasons. (For exact data on “re-audits,” see my article “Audits Of US Monetary Gold Severely Lack Credibility.”) After years of prosecuting, these are the facts as they lay in front of us: The majority of Deep Storage vault compartments have been “re-opened” for unknown or dubious reasons. (Again, for details, see “Audits Of US Monetary Gold Severely Lack Credibility .” )

) Under oath, the auditor, Thorson, carefully avoided the subject of “re-opening” compartments.

In another written statement, the same auditor lied about the subject of “re-opening” compartments.

When this auditor was asked for an explanation regarding the “re-opening” of compartments, it could only muster an unfitting one. I find it astonishing that all falsehoods the auditor (OIG) has spread have in common that they hide the fact compartments have been “re-opened.”

The author is correct, of course: gold remaining under such seal, never to be used, is valueless. And that's the key to why the vaults are being unsealed, and according to the Inspector General himself, gold is being moved from one vault to another.

And this is a hugely significant clue as to what might be happening, and it's also perhaps huge confirmation of one of my highest of high octane speculations concerning a "hidden system of finance" that I've elaborated over the years in connection with black projects, secret accounts, and - yes - the bearer bonds scandals. But how did I leap to that conclusion from this one clue? It's very simple. Let's recall for a moment the Schacht-Strong affair of 1928, which Schacht, then the head of Germany's Reichsbank, records in his memoirs. On a 1928 visit to his friend, Benjamin Strong Jr, then Governor of the New York Federal Reserve, Schacht was taken on a tour of the underground vaults of the bullion depository. When he asked to see Germany's gold, Strong's staff embarrassingly reported that they couldn't find it. Schacht, in his memoirs, records that he simple smiled and said "That's ok, I know you're good for it."

But to appreciate the full strangeness of this episode, it's essential to understand that it would be virtually impossible to lose some country's gold, unless it had been deliberately and covertly removed from its vault, because each country has its own individual storage vault for its gold. When accounts were settled, the gold was physically moved from one country's vault, to another, say, from France's vault, to Germany's. That Schacht would ask the question means that he knew that the accounts were such that Germany's vault should contain some gold. But apparently it didn't, and his country's gold was being used "elsewhere." He had, in effect, caught the Governor of the NY Federal Reserve in a "whopper doozie", and I have even speculated that it was this precise incident which provided Schacht with the leverage to get such a light sentence at the Nuremberg Trials after World War Two.

So with that in mind, let's return to those broken seals, and to the Inspector General's statement to former Congressman Ron Paul in 2011: the seals had been broken, because it was necessary to move gold from one vault to another. The movement as such is similar to the way a central bank bullion depository would move physical gold from one vault to another to reflect the clearing of accounts between countries, only in this case, these vaults do not belong to countries, they are simply numbered. They could, of course, belong to a country, but they could just as easily belong to other "clients" who need and require secrecy. Even to have access to these vaults would require "an inside job," and that, I strongly suspect, would be by people infiltrated into the positions to be able to do so, by intelligence agencies perhaps, for let us recall President Truman's decision to recover Japanese gold, and to keep it secret and in the hands of the National Security Council, thus effectively putting the postwar American intelligence "community" into the covert banking business. The physical movement of gold into and out of vaults when accounts were cleared could then be tied to the movements of those bearer bonds which (we've been assured) are completely fraudulent and unauthentic. Equally importantly, the movement of gold into and out of vaults would also be the perfect way to covertly inject any recovered Axis bullion into the stream.

In other words, I strongly suspect that we've just been given a clue as to one crucial aspect of what I've been calling the hidden system of finance. And if you've been following the rationale of today's high octane speculation, there's one final, disturbing implication of all of this, namely, that the USA's deep storage gold isn't deep storage at all, but has long since been collateralized.

FASAB 56 anyone?

See you on the flip side...