“Chris Powell (usagold.com 02April2009; 21:02)
Let’s have a contest: Find the IMF gold
Maybe our forum here should have a contest with a prize for anyone who can locate the gold supposedly belonging to the International Monetary Fund. Because of my e-mail correspondence with the IMF last April (www.gata.org/node/6242), I don’t think the IMF has any gold at all directly under its control, just a tenuous claim on some of the gold of its member nations. Here’s how I related my correspondence with the IMF at GATA’s conference in Washington last April.

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This month I wrote to the managing director of the IMF, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, with five questions about the IMF’s gold. I copied the letter to the IMF’s press office by e-mail, and quickly began to get some answers from one of its press officers, Conny Lotze.

My first question was: “Your Internet site says the IMF holds 3,217 metric tons of gold ‘at designated depositories.’ Which depositories are these?”

Conny Lotze of the IMF replied, but not specifically. She wrote: “The fund’s gold is distributed across a number of official depositories,” noting that the IMF’s rules designate the United States, Britain, France, and India as IMF depositories.

My second question was: “If you’d prefer not to identify the depositories for security reasons, could you at least identify the national and private custodians of the IMF’s gold and the amounts of IMF gold held by each?”

Conny Lotze replied, again not very specifically: “All of the designated depositories are official.”

My third question was: “Is the IMF’s gold at these depositories allocated — that is, specifically identified as belonging to the IMF — or is it merged with other gold in storage at these depositories?”

Conny Lotze replied, still not very specifically: “The fund’s gold is properly accounted for at all its depositories.”

My fourth question was: “Do the IMF’s member countries count the IMF’s gold as part of their own national reserves, or do they count and identify the IMF’s gold separately?”

Conny Lotze replied a bit ambiguously: “Members do not include IMF gold within their reserves because it is an asset of the IMF. Members include their reserve position in the fund in their international reserves.”

This sounded to me as if the IMF members are still counting as their own the gold that supposedly belongs to the IMF — that the IMF members are just listing the gold assets in another column on their own books.

My fifth question to the IMF was: “Does the IMF have assurances from the depositories that its gold is not leased or swapped or otherwise encumbered? If so, what are these assurances?”

Conny Lotze replied: “Under the fund’s Articles of Agreement it is not authorized to engage in these transactions in gold.”

But I had not asked if the IMF itself was swapping or leasing gold. I had asked whether the custodians of the IMF’s gold were swapping or leasing it.

This prompted me to raise one more question for Conny Lotze. I wrote her: “Is there any audit of the IMF’s gold that is available to the public? I ask because, if the amount of IMF gold held by each depository nation is not public information, there doesn’t seem to be much documentation for the IMF’s gold, nor any documentation for the assurance that its custody is just fine. Without any details or documentation, the IMF’s answer seems to be simply that it should be trusted — that it has the gold it says it has, somewhere.”

And Conny Lotze … well, that was 10 days ago, and she has not answered that question yet, and I don’t think she is going to. For I’m beginning to find that the only thing that offends a government officer more than a four-letter word is that five-letter word: A-U-D-I-T.

That the International Monetary Fund apparently refuses to account for the gold it claims to have should be potential news for the financial media. We hope they will pursue that issue before they next attempt to scare the gold market with stories about IMF gold sales.

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Of course the financial news media have not yet pursued that story, even as they are still helping the IMF try to scare the gold market. ”