WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ARGENTINA’S GOLD?
Something is going on with Argentina's gold, according to the following article shared by D.P.(for which we are grateful). The question is...what? The article, as one might imagine, has its own speculations, and I have another:
New shipment of Argentine gold abroad reported
According to the article, the administration of President Javier Milei is trying to get a return on its gold by investing it, rather than simply storing it:
A video of an armored truck carrying some 1500 gold bars from Argentina's Central Bank (BCRA) to the Ezeiza International Airport went viral Monday as the third such shipment -worth around US$ 250 million- was presumed to have left for London, it was reported in Buenos Aires. No special security was seen around the vehicle on the highway leading to the air terminal.
According to Argentine Economy Minister Luis Toto Caputo, it was a wise move on the part of the BCRA. “It is a very positive move by the Central. Today you have gold in the Central Bank which is as if you had real estate inside, you cannot use it for anything. On the other hand, if you have it outside, you can get a return. And the reality is that the country needs to maximize the return on its assets. Keeping it locked up in the Central Bank without doing anything for the country is negative. It is better to have it guarded outside where you get paid something,” Caputo said in a TV interview a month ago after previous shipments departed on June 7 and 28.
This has prompted predictable legislative attempts to discover what is going on, and by implication, why it is really going on:
In this scenario, opposition lawmakers demanded some explanation from Caputo as to what would eventually happen to the gold. “In the end, the campaign slogan that 'The only way out” was Ezeiza seemed to have become true, Congressman Leandro Santoro stressed.
“On July 29 I sent together with Senator Oscar Parrilli a request for public information and note to Luis Caputo demanding explanations on the transfer of the gold assets of Argentines abroad,” recalled Senator Juliana Di Tullio (UxP - BA). “We have not yet obtained an answer. If this persists, I will initiate legal actions”, she also warned on X.
Congressman Sergio Palazzo, who is also secretary-general of the bank workers' union, was the one who first denounced these maneuvers from President Javier Milei's Libertarian administration. He asked the BCRA for information and he got the following reply: “...any data related to the geographic location... may endanger the security of these assets, with its consequent impact on the support of the monetary and exchange policy implemented, the support of deposits and the security of the financial system...” (Emphasis added)
It's that last italicized sentence which clearly suggests something else entirely is going on, something having to do with "the support of the monetary and exchange policy" and "the support of deposits and the security of the financial system." Those are very telling words, not only because of what they say, but also because of their careful and studied omissions: just whose exchange policy is being talked about? whose monetary policy? And whose or what financial system's security is in view? just Argentina's? South America's? Argentina is, after all, along with Brazil, the heavy weight in South America, and everyone else is peripheral to various degrees.
If one views the answers to these questions are being simply restricted to Argentina itself, then the answers make some sense. One need only recall the prior administrations of President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner and her spirited appearances before the UN General Assembly complaining of Argentina's being hard pressed by the western (and largely American) hedge funds demanding payment on Argentina's debt. In such a context, demands for hard assets - like gold - to continue Argentina's credit, would make sense. But if one recalls President Kirchner's complaints more exactly, they were directed at the whole western system, which one may call the "IMF" system: large loans are made to countries like Argentina in full knowledge they will be unserviceable, so that hard assets can be seized when the debt is not serviced. It is a strategy of literally and deliberately banking on the default of the debt. President Kirchner, you might recall, was pointing out not only that Argentina was being caught and squeezed by that strategy, so, indeed, would the entire West be eventually so squeezed.
This is why I rather suspect that something more than just Argentina is involved in this most recent shipment of its gold to "somewhere", because the language chosen by the central bank of Argentina suggests that its gold reserves are somehow part of an operation designed not just to prop up Argentina, but the entire western financial system. It is of a piece, in other words, with the central bank gold purchases of recent years, the gold repatriations of Germany (and rumored and attempted repatriations of other countries, most notably Venezuela, which, you might recall, was denied by the Bank of England on the simple grounds of "We don't like you"), and the state bullion depository craze going on in some American states.
What all this means I do not know, except that I am going to repeat a warning that seems absurd, especially in the wake of the wild inflation the USA and some other countries are experiencing. I'm reminded of the period immediately after the American War Between the States, and the effects of the Resumption Act, which was an attempt to move post-bellum America away from the Lincoln greenbacks and debt-free fiat money (and the inflation and currency depreciation) that resulted (of course, there were other purposes that this represented, and I speculate about some of these in my forthcoming book. I mention that there are other possibilities here just for people to bear that in mind). In effect, it was an attempt to redeem those greenbacks at par in specie, which led to the post-war deflation and all the back and forth debates over gold standard or bi-metallism, and cultimating in William Jennings Bryan's populist movement and famous "Cross of Gold Speech". Even more to the point, that period of American history was a vigorous and public debate on the nature of money, until the whole public nature of the debate was finally closed down by the administration of (the perfectly hideous) Woodrow Wilson, and the passage of the Federal Reserve act in the quiet of the night and during a holiday Congressional hiatus. Money monopoly restored, public debate closed, post-war deflation avoided (of course, they had yet to engineer that "little" war called World War One, but with the Federal Reserve finally in place, they were ready to go, and were not going to repeat the mistakes of the American Civil War). That post-bellum deflationary period, I suggest, might again emerge if the current circumstances and developments align themselves in a certain way. And someone appears to be hedging their bets, with Argentina's - and presumably others' - gold. Time will tell, of course, which course of action will emerge, but with everyone looking at inflation, in times where there is much talk of return to bullion standards and specie, it is good to remember the post-bellum deflationary experience. But if your agenda is a sudden population decrease, then a sudden and sharp decrease in the money supply and resulting deflation might just be the ticket, because remember, in that post-bellum deflation the class hardest hit were... the producers of food, the farmers.
See you on the flip side...
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