POOF ...IT'S GONE!!!
An organisation called The World Gold Council puts out a monthly report that shows the official gold holdings of every country in the world. Unsurprisingly, a check on it's website will show that the United States has more gold than any other country. But readers will find it interesting to note that the Council's report for March 2010 showed that Trinidad & Tobago had 1.9 tonnes of gold ... which works out to be about 50,000 ounces, or a value of about US$650 million in gold at then current prices. The website can be found at
http://www.gold.org/assets/file/value/stats/statistics/archive/pdf/World_Official_Gold_Holdings_Mar_2010.pdf
You will find Trinidad & Tobago at no. 90 in the top 100 countries in this list.
But if you check the same list for September, 2010 you will find that the gold holdings of Trinidad & Tobago has seemingly disappeared! Now, US$650 million is more than 4 1/4 billion Trinidad & Tobago dollars. So, what happened? Were the country's gold holdings sold? When? Why? (Gold has been increasing in value this year. It's not exactly the best time to sell.) Who took the decision to sell? Who bought it? Was this done before or after the elections in May? Have we been told that we sold all of our gold holdings? I can't remember any announcement being made.
In these hard times $4 billion is a lot of money ... well, even in good times that is a lot of money! So, what happened? Don't you think that we are owed an explanation?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hey Robin; I was wondering where were you? What's the haitus about? Please let us know.
ReplyDeletepeople don't understand the true role that (precious) metal commodities play in keeping an economy such as ours alive. Think Dubai, a small oil rich country that has built up ALOT of gold reserves. You need the cold metallic stuff if you want to be "big" on the world stage....
ReplyDeleteThere is an Xls spreedsheet here: -
ReplyDeletehttp://www.research.gold.org/reserve_asset/
entitled "World gold Holdings - volume and value".
It shows that T&T held 1.9 tonnes as far back as first quarter 2000. It reports the 1.9 tonnes for each successive quarter until last quarter of 2009. Then in first quarter 2010 there is no report of the gold reserves being held. The 2009 central bank financial report in T&T shows the value of the reserves up September 2009, the end of the country's financial year. I wonder what really happened here, where did the gold go? Mr. Montano please pursue on our behalf.