Now the Dutch are worried about their gold (they should be!)

Uneasiness in the Netherlands about national gold reserve

Submitted by cpowell on Thu, 2012-10-25 14:32. Section: Daily Dispatches
Thanks to our friend Louis Boer for the translation of this report from Dutch to English.
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From Nederlands Dageblad
Barneveld, Netherlands
Wednesday, October 24, 2012

http://www.nd.nl/artikelen/2012/oktober/24/vraagtekens-burgers-bij-goudv…
Almost 300 "concerned Netherlands citizens" have joined the German initiative for insight about the gold reserves.

In a petition the citizens committee demands "full openness on the quantity and storage location of the Netherlands’ physical gold, and on the extent and nature of the gold claims."

In Germany a lot of uneasiness has risen about the quantity, value, and quality of the gold reserves, which have not been audited in many years at various storage locations. Led by the tabloid newspaper Bild, German news media are wondering whether the 3.4-million kilograms of ingots are really there (valued at about E150 billion).

Under pressure from the German federal audit office, part of the gold stock will be repatriated from the United States to Frankfurt.

The Netherlands faces similar uneasiness about the position of its gold treasure — 612,000 kilograms with of a value of about E25 billion. The gold, in part located at De Nederlandse Bank in Amsterdam (about 10 percent), is also located at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in Ottawa, and London.

The Netherlands comes tenth on the list of gold reserves. The United States leads with 8.1 million kilograms. Germany comes second.

Tom Lassing, one of the signers of the petition and owner of the website beursbox.nl, says central banks are unjustly mysterious with gold reserves.

"The last years have seen a loss of trust in the financial system and we have been fooled a lot," Lassing says. "So I say: Just let the central banks like DNB show the gold is really there."

According his fellow signer Harm van Wijk of beursbulletin.nl there is every reason for an audit. "The reliability of politicians appeared not very great on the Greek issue, so rather than being ostriches we should seek certainty on the gold reserves."

One of the concerns is that the gold reserves of central banks has been pledged repeatedly through negotiable title deeds. Experts like commodities dealer Eric Sprott maintain that there is much more "paper" gold in circulation than there are ingots in the bank vaults.

Since 1990 the Netherlands has sold almost 1.1 million kilograms of its gold reserves.

Netherlands’ Citizens Group Demands Central Bank Reveal Location of Country’s Gold Reserves

October 27, 2012 By The Doc

First Venezuela, then Germany, and now the Netherlands want their gold back. In the wake of this week’s ruling by the German Federal Accountability Office that Germany must repatriate and audit 150 tons of its gold reserves from the NY Fed over the next 3 years, a Netherlands citizens committee has filed a petition demanding the Central Bank release information ”on the quantity and storage location of the Netherlands’ physical gold, and on the extent and nature of the gold claims.”

In the words of one of the petitioners Tom Lassing: “The last years have seen a loss of trust in the financial system and we have been fooled a lot. So I say: Just let the central banks like DNB show the gold is really there.

Should the citizens committee be successful, we are confident they will discover the vast majority of the country’s gold reserves- 10th largest in the world at 612,000 kilograms, are held in the basement of the NY Fed.

As we stated several days ago, the jig is now up. The German accountability office will trigger an avalanche of gold audit, delivery, and repatriation requests around the Western world. We wish the Fed luck staying ahead of the cascading avalanche of requests to convert unallocated (rehypothecated) gold into solid physical metal. They’re going to need it.

From Nederlands Dageblad
Almost 300 “concerned Netherlands citizens” have joined the German initiative for insight about the gold reserves.
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