It seems like nearly the whole planet is raising questions about gold, and more specifically the actual amounts of gold reserves held by the various central banks. We've all seen the stories of the last decade or so as countries. In the wake of the 20o8 meltdown and "bailouts," various countries started buying gold, with Russia, China, and India leading the list. Then came what we'll call the "audit and repatriate" movements in various countries. Germany led that, as according to most accounts, it supposedly holds the second largest gold reserves in the world, after the United States of America. Private groups in Germany pressured the Bundesbank to repatriate its gold reserves held in France, the Bank of England, and most importantly, the New York Federal Reserve. Again, supposedly, some of that gold was returned, and supposedly the Bundesbank did an audit, and published some of the results, and almost immediately questions were raised. Then other countries jumped on the "repatriate and audit" bandwagon, notably Austria, the Netherlands, and of course, Venezuela. Recently the Bank of England said "no you can't have your gold bank" (a very bad precedent).

And along the way while all this was going on through the years, there were stories of gold bars showing up on Chinese markets, but woops, they were merely gold plated tungsten bars, and similar stories emerged from Canada as I recall, involving coins certified by the Royal Canadian Mint, or something. It's been rather confusing if you've been trying to follow it all.

Well, now it seems it's Australia's turn, as questions are being raised about its gold. This article was spotted by Ms. K.M. and Mr. H.B., and there are a few things in here that really grabbed my attention, and as one might expect, I have to do some high octane speculation about it. The article is from Zero Hedge, and it contains a somewhat helpful review of the whole issue, with, of course, final bit of advocacy for gold and gold-backed money:

What's Up With Australia's 80 Tonnes Of Gold At The Bank Of England?

What's interesting to note here is that now Russia has jumped into the fray in a more-or-less semi-official manner through its well-known RT news outlet, raising questions about other countries' gold, in this case, Australia's. According to the article, RT asked Zero Hedge about the whole subject, and for our purposes, we'll return to this point, as it bears on our high octane speculation of the day.

Recently, news network RT.com asked for comments on the question of the 80 tonnes of the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) gold reserves and their supposed storage location at the Bank of England's gold vaults in London. Based on some of those comments I made, RT has now published an article in its English language news website at www.rt.com about this Australian gold that the RBA claims is held in London. The RT.com article, which was published on 18 February 2018, is titled "Hey UK! It's not just Venezuela, what happened to Australia's gold?", and can be read in full here on the RT website. For the commentary, RT actually asked me quite a few interesting questions on both the Australian gold and other related gold topics. Since both the extended questions and the answers might be of interest to readers, we have decided to publish below the full set of questions and answers in Q&A format, which are as follows...

At this juncture, the question of Australia's gold reserves comes up, and here is part of the RT question answer exchange:

1) What happened to Australia’s gold? What’s your opinion? The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) claims to have 80 tonnes of gold bars stored in a bailment arrangement, in an allocated gold account, at the Bank of England vaults in London. Bailment means the Bank of England is custodian, and the RBA owns and has title to specific serial numbered gold bars. However, there have never been any independent physical audits of this gold, which means that there is no way to verify the RBA’s claim that it has all the gold that it claims to have. In 2013, the Bank of England allowed the RBA to do a partial audit of some of the claimed RBA gold holdings, but the results of this audit remain secret, and even after FOIA requests, the documents from this audit were blocked by both the Bank of England and the RBA and never released. This also raises a red flag. ... Throughout the last 20 years, the RBA also admits that a lot of its claimed gold holdings have been lent out in the secretive London Gold Lending Market, but there is no information whatsoever available on any of these lending transactions or the serial numbers of the gold bars involved. In other words, there has never even been one snapshot publication of a proper industry standard weight list for these RBA gold bars (by refiner serial numbers), let alone an updated weight list every time the RBA lent out or closed a gold lending deal. During the years 1999 - 2004, the RBA says that almost all of it's gold was on loan, and the RBA is still in the gold lending market to this day, for example, 10 tonnes of its claimed 80 tonnes at the Bank of England were said to be on loan during 2018. The important point here is that the gold bars that the RBA would have title to at the completion of a gold lending deal would not be the same bars that it held prior to this gold being lent to a bullion bank in London. Independent physical audits, full and proper weight lists, details of gold lending transactions, and above all a transparent attitude, would all allow instant verification of the RBA's claims about the sovereign Australian gold holdings. That the RBA and Bank of England refuse to do any of these things is highly suspicious. Therefore, there is no black and white way to say that the RBA has the 80 tonnes of gold it claims to have.

Then, question number three is asked, and it's illuminating to cite some of the answers given in response:

3) Some experts believe that western central banks are “covertly disposing” of their gold or otherwise leasing it to China and India through bullion banks. Do you believe in that? Do you believe there’s some grand, global gold conspiracy involving the world’s central banks? There is a mountain of evidence that Western central banks despise the power of gold and will go to great lengths at the highest levels to contain the gold price through coordinated interventions and anti-gold policies. From the London Gold Pool of the 1960s, to the US and IMF gold sales in the 1970s, to the 1980s Gold Pool discussions at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), to the Bank of England intervening into the London Gold Fixes in the 1980s, G10 central bank governors have often been personally involved in committing to gold market manipulation. ... As regards the Australian and Canadian gold sales, the more logical explanation for both of these was that they were coordinated gold sales by G10 central banks as part of a plan to fire-fight the physical gold market or to bail out gold short bullion banks, or that the sales were part of secretive gold re-distributions to other countries, such as to China. While this may seem far-fetched, you have to realize that central banks never tell the truth, especially when it comes to the gold market, and that the sheer numbers of central bank gold sales around that time in the 1990s and 2000s, including by the UK and Switzerland, point to something collusive about the sales rationales. ... At a broader level, there seems to be collusive policy behind the scenes of western central banks offloading physical gold in a coordinated manner through secretive sales and leasing it to achieve various policy objectives. These objectives include inducing extra gold supply to dampening down the gold price....(Emphasis added)

Keep that little remark about "inducing extra gold supply to dampen down the gold price" in mins, because it too has something to do with today's high octane speculation.

Then comes the Sixth question, and the answers given are stunners:

6) Australian economist John Adams said: “In the last 20 years we’ve only seen the gold once.” According to Adams, the RBA audit was so flawed it was basically meaningless. Is there any chance that the BoE could manufacture bars with fake serial numbers? The Bank of England allowed Australia’s central bank to do its own partial gold audit in 2013, and to inspect a random sample of the RBA gold bars, This audit was basically meaningless, yes, and was flawed from start to finish. Knowledge of this gold audit kept out of the public domain and the results of the audit were totally censored and buried. Only via FOIA requests did the Australian public even get a glimpse into what was going on. The FOIA emails and correspondence that the RBA did release were heavily redacted without any details of how many gold bars were selected and what the sample size was, and the results of the audit were not published. No one in any industry would accept such conditions for an audit nor of the so-called audit results. At no time did the Bank of England supply a proper weight list to the RBA with the refiner serial numbers of the claimed gold holding. The RBA had to select some bars a month in advance and advise the Bank of England of the bars its wanted to examine. This in itself is ridiculous. For example, the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) has full annual audits of all of its gold holdings (of nearly 800 tonnes), i.e. 10 times more than the RBA holds. Since the GLD can get its gold physically audited twice per year, there is no reason why the RBA cannot. In July 2013, just before the RBA's flawed and partial audit, the RBA didn’t even have formal ‘gold safe-custody arrangements’ in place with the Bank of England since it had to ask for “gold safe-custody arrangements between the RBA and the BoE to be formally clarified”. That's according to a glimpse of some RBA - Bank of England correspondence that did make it out in one of the FOIA emails released. After the audit, the RBA blocked publication of the audit results document stating that it “would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage to’ the relationship between the RBA and the BoE” and that it could “render less effective of procedures or methods for the conduct of tests, examinations or audits’ by the Bank”. This is complete nonsense. (Emphases in the original).

So, once again, like Germany, we find an audit by a central bank that is not really an audit in any conventional sense, since the results are not only keep hidden, but those results could "reasonably be expected to cause damage to the relationship" between the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank of England. Interestingly enough, these types of results seem to be mirrored in the recent FASB regulations which essentially have taken the entire US federal budget "black." So we have (1) an audit that wasn't an audit, (2) the clear implication that something is being covered up (3) the claim that "extra gold supply" is being "induced" to "dampen down the price" of gold, and finally (4) Russia drawing attention to it through RT.

So my high octane speculation of the day requires mention on one final point. Regular readers here, or of my books (In particular, Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations) will be aware that for some time I have speculated about the existence of a hidden system of finance, something deeper than the "black budget", something created to maintain over several decades a large funding mechanism for the financing of the USA's enormous black projects world. This mechanism I believe was formally put into place after World War Two by President Truman, though I do see indications of something like it being assembled prior to that war in a kind of ad hoc manner. In any case, this system, I have argued, was based upon the secret recovery, and use of, the Axis plunder from World War Two, and in particular, the recovery of the bullion looted from Asia under Imperial Japan's Operation Golden Lily. This supply, in addition to any gold mined since the war (which in my opinion again is subject to the same sort of obfuscation of the amounts by banks and mining companies as the actual gold audits themselves) constituted a hidden reserve, which could be effectively re-hypothecated over and over again (since only a few knew how much there was, and that "few" may not have included the central bankers themselves, but rather, the intelligence community). The effect was to be able to create liquidity as needed.

So why is Russia now involved in covering the story. My high octane speculation and suspicion is, that they know various aspects of this story, and perhaps know it in some detail. There has been the odd hint over the years from Russia that they do indeed "know something" about this system and the international cabal behind it. (Consider Dr. Tatyana Koriagina's statements in Pravda a few months prior to 9/11, that America would suffer dramatic attacks on its own soil, but that these attacks would come from such a cabal and that this cabal had assets of over $300 trillion to play with). Russia has also pointed out the dangerous precedent set by the Bank of England in refusing to return Venezuela's gold reserves. If my "hidden system-re-hypothecation" scenario has any validity, I suspect Russia may have intelligence on how much was so re-hypothecated, and by whom, when, and where. Additionally, I suspect they may have intelligence on how much gold has been "induced" from various sources into the system, releasing bits of information in dribs and drabs, rather than exposing the whole thing all at once, and causing a collapse.

If I'm right about all this speculation, then one can expect to see in the future more such stories and - not to coin a pun - the odd "nugget" or two of detailed information to add to the overall picture of corruption that began to be painted in this article. After all, the article paints the clear implication that something is amiss, running all the way from Canberra to London.

See you on the flip side...