You successfully added to your cart! You can either continue shopping, or checkout now if you'd like.
Note: If you'd like to continue shopping, you can always access your cart from the icon at the upper-right of every page.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/296124-seems-like-mexico-purchased-110-tons-of-gold-that-don-t-exist
It appears that in 2009 the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) bought 110 tons of gold, only to find that they had only purchased a gold BOND, essentially, an IOU. This IOU is being stored by a LBMA Bank--for a fee, of course--as if it actually costs money to store some figures on a ledger in a computer.
To make matters worse, Jeffrey Christian, a gold market analyst who has often worked for bullion banks, testified at a CFTC hearing on March 25, 2010, and let it slip that the LBMA banks have only about 1% of all the physical gold they've allegedly "sold" and "stored", after you add up both the derivatives they've issued, and the unallocated storage schemes. This means that if more than a few percent worth of the owners of the unallocated gold ever demanded delivery at the same time, they would get nothing. The same is true in the silver market....
By entering into such arrangements, the Bank of Mexico has become an unsecured creditor of the bullion bank that sold them on the deal. Like so many other institutional and private investors, Banxico has made the mistake of trusting the London bullion bankers. It was duped into buying what is essentially an unsecured "bond" giving a claim not on gold, but rather, merely upon the general assets of the selling bank....
Instead of owning a valuable asset (gold), free of counter-party risk, Mexico owns nothing. It appears to merely be an unsecured secured creditor of a London mega-bank that is probably insolvent like most of them.
Many of the LBMA banks were kept alive solely by the grace of bailouts from their headquarters' national government. If one of these banks eventually does officially go belly-up, they will all go belly-up, and Mexico's gold will be lost forever.
If any person or any government wants to buy gold or silver, they ought to buy the physical metal, rather than get a piece of paper that is just an IOU from a bank that could well be insolvent soon. These banks "sell" gold, by taking people's money in exchange for an IOU. Then they charge a storage fee without actually storing any gold. This way they use the money essentially as an interest-free loan for as long as the people are willing to have them store the non-existent gold in an empty space in their vault.
Welcome to Mystery Babylon (alias, "Fascism").