Saturday, April 06, 2013

Fractional Reserve Gold?

I saw this yesterday. One of the ways for goldbugs to store their shinies is to have them stored somewhere else, like this Dutch bank. It looks like they were using this bank as a broker to buy and store their gold.

Gold is very heavy, and probably not easy to store. A book on my list to read is Anna Eisenmenger's diary, Blockade. In it, she says people in Austria who had gold stored had it stolen from them. I do not believe gold to be the safe investment/value store it's made out to be when an emergency strikes.

In any case, for those who wish to maintain a vast store of gold, paying somebody else to store it is probably best in normal times. I don't think we're in normal times anymore. For those who wished to buy gold through this Dutch bank, it isn't.

That doesn't mean they can't just buy their gold somewhere else.

I can't discern from the article why the bank will no longer deliver gold to customers, but instead will pay them the value of their gold in a fiat currency, probably the Euro. My first thought was they're treating gold the same way they do money, through a fractional reserve system. The article doesn't give enough detail though. Just that if you bought gold through them, and want your gold delivered, you'll get paper instead.

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