Jim Rickards - The US Won’t Give Germany its Gold

kingworldnews.com

With gold and silver surging higher along with stocks, today King World News interviewed KWN Resident Expert Jim Rickards, Senior Managing Director at Tangent Capital Markets. Recently, there has been speculation that Germany may want its gold back from the United States. When asked about the German gold stored in the US, Rickards responded, “Well that’s a really good question and this is really clouded in obscurity. Germany has been completely non-transparent about that information. We do know that Germany has about 3,000 tons. We also know there are 6,000 tons in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and that gold does not belong to the United States.”

Jim Rickards continues:
“A little bit of it does, but not very much. So most of the 6,000 tons in New York belongs to other countries. Not all of the European gold is in New York, but a lot of it is. So this thing is really shrouded in mystery. But what we do know for a fact is that there are 6,000 tons in New York. It does belong to other countries and the IMF and in my view that gold is held hostage.

...So they (Gemany) started with no gold, but they earned their 3,000 tons by running trade surpluses through the 50s, 60s and 70s. So they’ve got it, but that gold started out in the United States, it was earned by Germany and most of it stayed in the United States.

But remember there were Russian tanks on the outskirts of Berlin. So there was good reason to put the gold in New York in the first place. But why hasn’t it been moved back to Frankfurt or back to Berlin? That’s a political question, the German people have to answer that for themselves....

“Now Italy has come out recently and they have actually been a little more transparent and they say most of their gold is in Italy, in Rome.

But I do know looking at it from a US perspective, as I’ve described in the book Currency Wars, if the US gets into extreme distress, and there’s a collapse in the dollar, I have no doubt that in an emergency basis the US will basically confiscate all the gold in their possession. Then they will convert it to back up a new gold based US dollar as plan B or some way to stop the crisis.

So it’s a political question for Germany as to whether they want their gold back, but sometimes you don’t ask questions if you don’t think you are going to like the answer. It would be interesting if Germany demanded that gold be shipped to Frankfurt or Berlin what the US would say.”

When asked if he thinks any of these countries are going to be selling any more of their gold, Rickards replied, “I don’t, Eric, and that is a startling turnaround from what has been the case for the last 15 years...The fact is the central banks have slammed on the brakes. Gold is back in play.”