The Fed Wages War on Gold

Question:   If you were advising the Federal Reserve, what would you say are the unsolved economic problems of the day?

Milton Friedman:  One unsolved economic problem of the day is how to get rid of the Federal Reserve.   - January 1996 interview on NPR

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Ron Paul has been aggressively seeking an official, independent audit of the gold that is supposedly being held at Ft. Knox on behalf of all U.S. citizens.  Such an audit has not taken place since Eisenhower was the President?   What gives there?  In the face of mounting criticism and citizen requests for this audit, why does the Treasury ignore this issue?  What does it have to hide?

At this point, anyone who looks at the Treasury financial statements is placing their "full faith" in the belief that the Government is honestly reporting its numbers.  Does anyone really believe that the economic numbers  the Government publishes on a weekly basis?  Everyone believe that the Government is telling truth about why we're spending trillions on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya?  

The Fed has been spending millions to fight all of the recent Freedom Of Information Act requests, which have been filed so that we can see what the Fed is doing secretly with our money - especially now that most of what Fed does has a guarantee on it by the Treasury.  Most notably for me is the GATA request that we get to see what kinds of transactions the Fed has been in engaging in with OUR gold.  It is highly likely that the 8100 tonne book entry on the Treasury balance sheet is just another electronic entry on a piece of paper.  How about we get to take a look at the actual physical gold that is supposedly represented by that electronic entry?  How about we get to see if that gold has any legal encrumbrances attached to it like Federal Reserve gold swaps and leasing transactions?

An audit needs to be done and it needs to be done under the full, transparent scrutiny of all U.S. citizens who would like to watch it happen.  And of even more immediate concern, at least to me, is the drain on physical gold and silver occurring at the Comex.  It's kind of spooky the way unencumbered physical silver is being, and has been, "sucked" out of the system (Comex, SLV) over the past couple months. As much as I want to see Ron Paul force an open audit of Ft. Knox, I'd love to see an open audit of the Comex. I believe the Comex problem is the Achilles Heel of this whole mess.

It wouldn't take much to stage a run on the Comex. And when that occurs, if it turns out that the Comex is unable to make deliveries of actual physical metal and instead changes its rules and defers to cash settlement of contracts, that's when all hell will break loose.  I would then expect that GLD and SLV will head south quickly in price while the global spot price of gold and silver head for the moon.  The slight inversion in silver futures will go nearly verticle and the dollar index will go into a serious tail-spin.  But how about we just start with a simple audit of Ft. Knox? 

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'  (famous speech by Francisco D'Anconia in "Atlas Shrugged")

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