Where has all Ukraine’s gold gone?

Ukraine’s Central Bank chief has divulged some shocking intel:

its gold stockpile has reached a new nadir – almost zero. Since the beginning of the year, gold reserves have dropped nearly 16-fold, which begs the question, where did all of it go?

“Official statistics of the National Bank show that the amount of gold in the vaults drastically fell, and it is unclear where it went. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $1 billion, or 8 percent of the total gold reserves,” the head of Ukraine’s National Bank, Valeria Gontareva, said in an interview with Ukraine’s Kharkiv TV.

As of November 1, the latest available data, foreign currency reserves stood at $12.6 billion, which puts Ukraine’s national gold stockpile at just $123.6 million, ZeroHedge reported.

However, this figure contradicts the $988.7 million, which is the level gold should stand at, if the ratio of gold to total reserves was 8 percent.

In February, before then-President Vicktor Yanukovich was toppled, gold reserves stood at about 21 tons, according to then chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine Sergey Arbuzov.

One theory is that Ukraine decided to shift its gold reserves to the US shortly after the presidential coup when Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk held a meeting with President Obama.

At the end of February, gold stood at $1.8 billion, or about 12 percent of reserves. The Central Bank reported that reserves stood at $1.6 billion in both July and August, and $1.7 billion in September.

Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann

In October, the bank was forced to sell $874 million worth of gold to service domestic and foreign public debts, according to the International Monetary Fund.

One of the main functions of the National Bank of Ukraine is to accumulate and store foreign exchange reserves and precious metals.

In May, the previous bank head, Stepan Kubiv, said that Ukraine planned to use part of its first tranche of International Monetary Fund loan to boost gold and currency reserves to stabilize the ailing currency, the hryvnia.

The IMF, which has denied Ukraine loans before due to corruption, in April pledged $17 billion over two years to help the country trying to closer align itself with Europe, and not Russia.

The bank stopped supporting the currency in mid-November when it fell into complete free fall. The hryvnia has lost 50 percent of its value against the dollar since the beginning of the year.

“The devaluation of the hryvnia is now 100 percent. At the last minute, businesses began to panic. Even after the devaluation of 50 percent, which began in July, we were able to stabilize the situation, but then the war started,”Gontareva said.

Ukraine’s economy has spun out of control since revolution and war gripped the country. The new government is facing rock-bottom reserves, sky-high inflation, contracting growth, natural gas shortages, and a looming default on debts.

Russia bans agricultural products from EU, USA, Australia, Norway, Canada

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Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree on the full ban for imports of beef, pork, poultry meat, fish, cheese, milk, vegetables and fruit from Australia, Canada, the EU, the US and Norway.

The ban will last a year, starting August 7.

The full list of banned products was published on the Russian legal information
website.

READ MORE: Putin bans agricultural imports from
sanctioning countries for 1 year

The Prime Minister also said Russia has stopped transit flights
by Ukrainian airlines to such destinations as Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey, adding that the country was
considering a ban of transit flights for European and US Airlines
to the Asia-Pacific region.

Western sanctions were a “dead-end track”, but Russia
has been forced to respond to the measures taken by the western
countries, Medvedev added.

Alcohol imports from both the EU and the US will not be
restricted.

“We are actually speaking of an embargo on imports of whole
categories of products from countries which have introduced
sanctions against Russian organizations and individuals,”
Medvedev said.

Dmitry Medvedev instructed the Federal Customs Service (FCS) to
see that the banned imports could not cross the Russian border.

The Russian PM has also warned against possible attempts to use
the situation to drive up prices.

“I would like to warn that attempts to gain from price
speculation in this situation will be roughly stopped,”
Medvedev said.

The Russian PM added that Moscow still had a lot of trading
partners abroad, which it had not placed on the retaliatory
sanctions list.

Russia’s agricultural watchdog Rosselkhoznadzor has announced
plans to increase imports from Chile, which could include
vegetables, fruit, fish, shellfish, meat and milk.

“Imports of fish, which last year amounted to 53,000 tons,
may grow two or three times. Shellfish imports might increase
from 3,000 tons to 15,000-20,000 tons,” the watchdog said in
a statement.

Medvedev said he sincerely hoped“our partners’ economic
pragmatism will prevail over bad political decisions, and they
will think before trying to frighten Russia and impose
restrictions on it. And mutual trade and economic partnership
will be restored in the volumes which existed before. We would
have liked that to happen.”

In 2013, Russia imported $6.7 billion of meat and meat products
in total. The largest suppliers came from now-banned countries
like Denmark (6.6% of total Russian meat products), Germany
(6.4%), USA (5.3%), and Canada (3.8%).

Reuters / Ilya Naymushin

Unique opportunity

Medvedev believes the year-long embargo Russia is imposing will
boost domestic agriculture. He acknowledged that Russian farmers
would have to come a long way, but said it was a unique
opportunity to develop facilities to substitute for imports.

“We are only lagging behind in production of certain
varieties of meat and milk. We have to catch up and our farmers
are ready to do so, especially if we help them.”

Triggered by the ban, Russia’s domestic production of
agricultural products could grow by about $10.8 billion in the
next 18 months, Russian Agriculture Minister Nikolay Fyodorov,
told ITAR–TASS.

The Governor of the Krasnodar Region, Aleksandr Tkachev has been
quick to react to the news by saying farmers in the region will
use the chance to replace imported goods with their own produce.

“I have spoken to the heads of agricultural enterprises,
concerning the presidential decree on the ban of imports of
Western agricultural goods,” Tkachev said, as cited by
ITAR-TASS. “The mood is on the whole optimistic. Krasnodar
farmers have received a strong stimulus to use all of their
potential.”

Krasnodar is already a big agricultural player in Russia. The
region is the third biggest producer of meat and eggs in the
country and the fourth biggest producer of milk.

The Astrakhan Region in Russia’s south also said it was ready to
increase agricultural production by 20–25 percent next year.

“There’s a real possibility that all the low quality goods,
which have been imported, will not appear on the Russian market
again. The country’s agriculture is now being given a historic
chance for a breakthrough, to increase production, the variety of
goods, and to improve processing technology,” the Governor
of the Astrakhan Region Aleksandr Zhilkin, told ITAR-TASS.

Banning certain imports from the West will provide “historic
opportunities” for Russia’s more distant territories in the Ural
Mountains and in the Far East.

“Russia is the richest country in the world and has unique
marine resources that unfortunately go abroad. However, the
demand for these products on the international market are very
high,” Irina Yarovaya, a Duma member from Kamchatka, said.

The new rule will help Russia develop its agriculture sector and
make it easier for Russian farmers to market their products, Igor
Rudensky, head of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy,
Innovation and Entrepreneurship said.

US debt six times greater than declared – study

Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji

The United States has accumulated over $70 trillion in unreported debt, an amount nearly six times the declared figure, according to a new study by University of California-San Diego economics Professor James Hamilton.

The unique aspect of Hamilton’s study  is that he examines federal debt that has not been publicly released, specifically the government’s support for “housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds.”

Since the global economy hit rock bottom in 2008, US federal debt has gone through the roof, increasing from $5 trillion to an estimated $12 trillion in 2013. Meeting the interest payments alone on that debt burden presents a formidable challenge for US taxpayers: In addition to the debt, Americans must pay back around $220 billion annually just in interest.

And with interest rates set to rise from their historic lows, Americans will be confronted with a significantly higher bill in the future. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that net interest expense on US federal debt will exceed the entire defense budget by 2021.

This fiscal horror story playing out across America, however, is actually much worse than publicly recognized.

Much of the current debt load is a direct result of the Great Recession of 2008, which saw an unprecedented effort on the part of Washington to rescue the US economy from financial ruin.

This led to a series of controversial operations on the part of the US Federal Reserve known as “quantitative easing” or “large-scale asset purchases.” The aim of these programs was that by buying long-term securities, the Fed would be able to lower the long-term interest rate, encourage investment and get the economy rolling again.

According to Hamilton, “the net effect of the Fed’s emergency lending between 2006 and 2008 was to increase the net indebtedness of the federal government by over a trillion dollars, balanced by acquisition of corresponding assets (the emergency loans).”

 

The real shocker in the report, however, came with the cost of Medicare and Social Security, which ran at $27.6 trillion and $26.5 trillion respectively.

Hamilton could not conceal his surprise at the findings.

“These numbers are so huge it is hard even to discuss them in a coherent way,” he said before providing a caveat on the US demographic situation. “The US population is aging, and an aging population means fewer people paying in and more people expecting benefits. This reality is unambiguously going to be a key constraint on the sustainability of fiscal policy for the United States.

“One would think we should be saving as a nation today as preparation for retirement, and if in fact we are not, the current enormous on-balance-sheet federal debt is all the more of a concern.”

It is not just the sick and elderly, however, who are adding to the US debt burden. Government loans for students also featured high in the report.

The US Department of Education approved $714 billion at the end of 2012, which is a significant jump from the $104 billion issued at the end of 2007.  But with the US economy failing to generate new jobs, many of these now college graduates lack the financial means to return their debt.

Although the report paints an extremely worrisome picture of America’s fiscal situation, some say it may actually be overly optimistic.

The US debt burden is much greater says Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” Kotlikoff said in an interview with National Public Radio. “That’s our true indebtedness.”

According to the US National Debt Clock, the US government has a $16.8 trillion debt, which comes out to be over $53,000 for each US citizen. Looking at those steadily accumulating numbers, it is difficult to see how the US will square the circle of a steadily-aging population together with the harsh reality of the modern economy.

Robert Bridge is the author of the book, Midnight in the American Empire, which examines the dangerous consequences of excessive corporate power in the United States.

Subjugation of Mao Zedong at THE QUEEN OF SPAIN!

DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS FOR THE TRANSMISSION OF GLOBAL trust!

DEPOSIT RECEIPT DOCUMENT of Global Trust  the newly CENTRAL BANK OF THE PHILIPPINES … DELIVERY DATE, AUGUST 1950 AND EXPIRY DATE IN 2000.

Transfer of rights from the Soekarno to Timpourkio Vilamor Mark (TV Marcos)

 

Paris Pact: Covert under United Nations for anyone associated with the bonds of Wells Fargo National Bank and their use because of gold transfer agreement.

 

 

Transfer of rights to TV Marcos code: STA ROMANA -1974

 

Letter with instructions for Chinese banks of gold from Wells Fargo transferred to China

 

QUOTE OF … Font of Mao Zedong – DATED 11/08/1974

 

 

 

 

Deposit Certificate of  620 tonnes of gold in UBS Switzerland that was part of manageable from Soekarno

 

 

Transfer of management rights to TV Marcos

 

Authorization by Ferdinand Marcos to the priest Doctor Floros E. Garcia manages mortgage banking deposits matters (it is rather a Jesuit priest but needs confirmation). Here members notified document.

 

Angela Merkel – gives orders to the German media!