July 4, 2009
Steve Collins
An alert reader sent me the links below, which are an appropriate follow-up story to my July 2nd blog about the Royal Canadian Mint “losing” some its closely-guarded gold. The BBC now reports that the Ethiopian Central Bank was caught trading gold bars which turned out to be steel bars that were only gold-coated. The fraud was detected by the South Africans when the gold was being transferred between their nations. In an audit, more fake gold was found in the Ethiopian Central Bank vaults. National Bank officials and others in Ethiopia have been arrested as this reeks of an “inside” job when you read the information in the two links below. The first link details the BBC story.
With gold “missing” from the Canadian Mint and fake gold being held in the Ethiopian Central Bank, one wonder how many other central banks and mints around the world are actually holding (or exhibiting) fake gold instead of the real thing. The second link reveals that is actually rather easy to fake gold bars by putting real gold on the outside of an inner bar made of tungsten. This kind of “fake gold” will match the “heaviness” test for real gold, and such fake gold bars would only be detected via more sophisticated tests of each gold bar in a bank vault. The fake Ethiopian Central Bank gold bars were caught because the fake inner cores were made of steel, which is far lighter than real gold so any informed gold expert would recognize it as a fake simply by holding the bar. The second link details information on the making and detection of fake gold bars (it would apparently not be difficult to fool laymen who think they are buying real gold bars when they are not receiving real gold).
This has serious ramifications for the global gold markets. Who is really holding actual gold in their Central Banks, National Mints, etc.? A cursory visual “inspection” of vaults which supposedly hold real gold will reveal nothing about whether the bars are real gold or merely gold-plated fakes. A true forensic audit would need to do more complex tests to determine whether Central Banks, National Mints, Bank Vaults, Gold ETF’s, etc. are holding real or fake gold for their respective nations and clients.
That even a national Central Bank was found to be holding and trading fake gold indicates that other national Central Banks around the world could also be holding fake gold bars. If Congress ever gets around to doing a long-overdue audit of the gold at Ft. Knox and in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Board, the COMEX, etc., they better do sophisticated tests to see if the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, the COMEX, etc. hold real gold bars or tungsten bars coated with a thin coat of gold. One also wonders how much of the gold held by exchange-traded GOLD ETFs is real gold or fake gold.
Since fake gold is showing up in National Banks and being “lost” from National Mints, one wonders who is amassing the real gold? Who has vast dollar reserves to convert into an almost limitless amount of gold? China does. China also admits it is amassing gold (I’ll bet the Chinese are making sure they are receiving real gold). Russia, China, Iran and other nations (who constitute the prophesied “Gog-Magog”‘ alliance of Ezekiel 38) just met in a Yeketerinburg, Russia monetary/economic conference from which the USA was barred. Rumors have long been floating about a new gold-backed currency to replace the debased US dollar as the global world currency. Revelation 17 and 18 prophesy that there will be a great global collapse of the monetary/economic system at some point in the latter days. That almost happened in September, 2008. A massive fraud in the gold reserves of major nations’ vaults could topple the governments and fiat currencies of the nations involved.
If some group of nations announces that they are issuing a new currency backed by gold and other natural resources (real assets), somebody better check the gold bars that are supposedly backing any such new currency. Some nations or entities might issue gold-backed currencies which are only backed by tungsten bars painted with real gold to fool gullible investors and reporters.
The fact that fake gold bars have shown up in the vaults and trading activities of a national Central Bank creates doubts about how many other nations are holding “fake gold,” not real gold. If I was a gold investor, I’d be worried. We now know fraud and counterfeiting is going on in the global gold markets. Who has the real gold, and how much do they have? The US Congress should be looking into this quickly, but they, like all other Americans, are being fed round-the-clock coverage of the Michael Jackson death. This tells you something about the credibility of the US establishment media.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-03/how-make-convincing-fake-gold-bars
