Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Another story was published today about the fabled gold supposedly looted by Japanese forces throughout Asia during World War II and hidden in the Philippines at the direction of Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita as Japan began to be beaten by the United States and its allies.

The story, written by Tom Metcalfe for LiveScience.com --

https://www.livescience.com/treasure-hunters-fabled-gold-philippines-isl...

-- reports that excavations are underway by treasure hunters on the Philippine island of Panay and that landslides from the excavations are feared.

Wikipedia provides a more complete account of the Yamashita story --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita%27s_gold

-- and over the years some people have argued that the United States recovered Yamashita's gold after the war and took it away surreptitiously, whereupon it has been used by the U.S. government for gold price suppression policy.

Surely Japan looted Asia during its operation of what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which briefly replaced Western colonialism with Japanese colonialism. And surely there is more monetary gold in the world than officially reported.

For starters, the true location and disposition of government gold reserves long have been secrets more sensitive than the location and disposition of nuclear weapons. Official gold reserve data is commonly falsified under International Monetary Fund policy:

http://www.gata.org/node/12016

And how many gold investors report to their governments, the IMF, the World Gold Council, or The Wall Street Journal how much gold they own and where they store it?

Gold is so sensitive because while nuclear weapons can only destroy the world, mastery of the gold supply can control the world -- can determine the value of all capital, labor, goods, and services, as the U.S. assistant undersecretary of state, Thomas O. Enders, explained to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a remarkable conversation at the State Department in Washington in April 1974 whose transcript is preserved at the internet site of the department's historian:

http://www.gata.org/node/13310

But if the United States ended up with any vast amount of looted gold entrusted to General Yamashita, evidence suggests that it was long gone by March 1968, when the London Gold Pool collapsed and was closed at the request of the U.S. government because U.S. gold reserves were being exhausted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool

Exhaustion of U.S. gold reserves was similarly indicated by President Nixon's closing of the so-called gold window in August 1971, when the United States "temporarily" repudiated its commitment to foreign governments to exchange their dollars for gold at $35 per ounce:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

A State Department cable suggests that this exhaustion of the U.S. gold reserves was behind the creation of the gold futures markets in 1974, whereupon the gold price could be manipulated by Western governments without further dishoarding of their real metal:

http://www.gata.org/node/17081

The enduring point here is that regardless of what happened to any gold hoarded by General Yamashita, and regardless of the hoards of the metal accumulated through history and still available to the market at the right price, gold remains an extraordinary financial asset -- money that, when held directly, is always good and without counterparty risk -- money whose supply is far more restricted than other forms of money and thus potentially far more valuable as supplies of the other forms of money are more rapidly increased.

This is what many governments desperately want to prevent the world from understanding.

After all, if gold was as common as adherents of the Yamashita legend suggest, the U.S. government long would have ensured that the laughably cheap prize in every box of Cracker Jack was a Louis d'Or.

For several years now there have been no prizes in Cracker Jack boxes, just a computer code entitling the owner of the empty box to download a game from the internet -- a game with no more substance than a Comex gold futures contract.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org

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 -- Published: Tuesday, 4 February 2020 | E-Mail  | Print  | Source: GoldSeek.com

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