A full copy of last week's Deutsche Bank report on the Swiss Gold
Initiative, provided by GATA consultant R.M., conveys these four major
points:
1) Any gold purchases made by the Swiss National Bank pursuant to approval
of the initiative in the referendum on November 30 are unlikely to have much
impact on the gold market because the purchases would be small and made over
time and because they likely would be accomplished outside the gold market
and through central banks, which are always trading gold among themselves.
(Secretly, of course, to facilitate their market interventions.)
2) The Swiss National Bank could evade the intent of the initiative by moving
its reserves into a sovereign wealth fund, thereby diminishing the need for
purchasing gold; by the bank's obtaining only gold derivatives rather than
gold itself; or, more likely, by "window dressing," by the bank's
obtaining gold only overnight at monthly reporting periods, using "gold
swaps," which could be quickly reversed until the next reporting period.
(In an interview published today, the chairman of the Swiss National Bank
said its creation of a sovereign wealth fund was "unthinkable" and
that "the SNB cannot simply use some tricks to circumvent the will of
the people. I rule that out categorically." See: http://www.gata.org/node/14733.)
3) "It is unknown," the Deutsche Bank report says, "to what
extent the major central banks engage in gold swap and repo transactions,
since official statistics no longer disaggregate these."
That is, the actual location and disposition of government gold reserves
are secrets far more sensitive than the location and disposition of nuclear
weapons, since, as was confirmed in the secret March 1999 report of the staff
of the International Monetary Fund to the IMF's Board of Directors, gold
reserves are frequently used by central banks for all sorts of market rigging
--
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
-- while nuclear weapons are extremely unlikely ever to be used.
4) The delay in the German Bundesbank's repatriation of its gold reserves
from the United States likely has been caused not by any logistical problem
but rather by "diplomatic difficulties."
The Deutsche Bank report is posted at GATA's Internet site here:
http://www.gata.org/files/DeutscheBankSwissGo...-11-14-2014.pdf
