There is an elephant in the room. Jim Rickards has been making some bold predictions while on his book tour for Currency Wars. He says that in the case of a collapse of confidence in the dollar, the U.S. could confiscate the gold owned by foreign governments, Germany in particular, that is stored in NYC at the Fed. He says the U.S. could then use this gold to dictate a new international monetary system based on U.S. currency, just like last time.

Here are a couple of Jim's tweets on the subject:

@JamesGRickards Got a bid from #Germany for foreign rights to #CurrencyWars. Germans should read it. Ch. 11 tells why they'll never see their gold again

@JamesGRickards @FrankfurtFinanz Yes. This is described in Ch 5 and Ch 11 of #CurrencyWars. #Germany will never see its #gold again

We don't like to ignore elephants at FOFOA, so please discuss. Should those countries with gold stored at the Fed be worried? I just know this makes different people uncomfortable for different reasons. I posted some of my own thoughts here in response to Wandee who wrote, "I’m hoping Rickards is right per Blondie’s post above and the US/West can muster up 20ktons and figure out some kind of new currency alignment."

Also, Jim was interviewed by Eric King at KWN the other day. Here's the link. And here's a partial transcript (h/t Blondie):

“...I can see it happening, and it might even be a good thing in the sense that if we combined the official US gold of 8000 tonnes and I think 6000 tonnes that we could confiscate from the Europeans, Japanese and the IMF, and there’s another several thousand tonnes out at JFK airport in warehouses controlled by ScotiaBank and HSBC, its amazing how concentrated the gold is, its not in that many places, its really ten, you can count ten places that hold really the vast majority of all the official gold in the world, combine all that gold and the US could easily have 17,000 tonnes or upwards of 20,000 tonnes, which is you know 70% of all the official gold in the world. That’s enough to dictate the outcome of the international monetary system. It would be like, it would be a lot like Bretton Woods... [other nations] they might as well have stayed at home because the US dictated the outcome... We could do it again if we had that much gold, we could say hey, here’s the deal, here’s the new currency, its the new American dollar, backed by gold, all you other people have to peg to it and if you want your gold back, get to work, and, and try earning it and you know we’ll give you an IOU or something.

Again, this is an extreme scenario, but I think it is something that would be likely to happen in extreme distress. I mean, governments are not just going to throw up their hands, if we have some kind of collapse of confidence in the dollar the United States government is not going to curl up in a ball and cry, they’re going to use executive orders and executive power to dictate an outcome.

[comparing the US to Rome as the current world superpower]... if we converted the European gold for our own purposes, think of it as a 100% tax”

2000 Flushes: 20,000 tons you say?...

FOFOA

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