Tucker Carlson has followed up on the topic of gold at Fort Knox in the following interview with Luke Gromen. Hadn't heard of Gromen before, he runs a company called
FFTT, or Forest For the Trees for investors. Here's his bio:
Luke Gromen has become one of the most respected names in the global research sector. Having been in the industry for 20+ years and earning a reputation as a client-focused analyst with an unparalleled ability to make broad connections between increasingly siloed industry news and drawing conclusions that help investors understand the bigger picture. Luke offers unique and insightful research derived from a wide variety of sources that provide a clearer picture of global macroeconomic, thematic, and sector trends.
Luke founded FFTT, LLC in early 2014 to address and leverage the opportunity he saw created by applying what clients and former colleagues consistently described as a “unique ability to connect the dots” during a time when he saw an increasing “silo-ing” of perspectives occurring on Wall Street and in corporate America. FFTT caters to institutions and sophisticated individuals by aggregating a wide variety of macroeconomic, thematic and sector trends in an unconventional manner to identify investable developing economic bottlenecks for his clients.
Prior to founding FFTT, Luke was a founding partner of Cleveland Research Company, where he worked from 2006-14. At CRC, Luke worked in sales and edited CRC’s flagship weekly thematic research summary piece (“Straight from the Source”) for the firm’s clients. Prior to that, Luke was a partner at Midwest Research, where he worked in equity research and sales from 1996-2006. While in sales, Luke was a founding editor of Midwest’s widely-read weekly thematic summary (“Heard in the Midwest”) for the firm’s clients, in which he aggregated and combined proprietary research from Midwest with inputs from other sources.
Luke Gromen holds a BBA in Finance and Accounting from the University of Cincinnati and received his MBA from Case Western Reserve University. He earned the CFA designation in 2003.
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Gromen claims to be an independent researcher and dot connector in political/financial arena.
1hr:34mins.
0:00 Gold Is Still Critical to Our Economy
8:17 The Government’s Secrecy Around Gold Ownership
13:17 Why Can’t Fort Knox Be Audited?
20:47 The Intel Community’s Propaganda Around Gold Owners
24:41 Is Warren Buffett a Political Pawn for the Banks?
30:17 The Biggest Global Players in the Gold Industry
32:26 The Secret Initiative to Slow Energy Production
41:19 Could Trump Use Gold to Fight National Debt?
50:47 America’s Dependence on China and How Trump Is Fixing It
1:02:21 The Parasite Bleeding the Life Out of Our Economy
1:11:29 Trump and Vance’s Big Picture Plan for the US Economy
1:22:15 Should You Invest in Gold?
An interesting point raised is that gold has two classifications - Monetary Gold and Non-Monetary Gold. These classifications are related to physical gold and not to associated paper or digital trading instruments.
Non-monetary gold covers all gold other than monetary gold. Monetary gold is owned by monetary authorities and held as a reserve asset. Non-monetary gold can be in the form of bullion (i.e. coins, ingots, or bars with a purity of at least 995 parts per 1,000, including such gold held in allocated gold accounts), gold powder, and gold in other unwrought or semi-manufactured forms.
Groman states at 7:18 :"Monetary gold, to your point, doesn't have to be declared as it moves is how I understand the rules. And so when you see monetary gold movements there is still very much an element of secrecy and non-transparency and yes some of that is the publics money and its not being disclosed why it's moving and how much exactly.
IOW and if Groman is correct, the government hasn't technically broken the law if there is gold missing from Fort Knox. They may as well have left the doors open! Those funds may have been used fraudulently, but since they're unlikely to be traced tracking criminal activity could be very difficult. But since private gold holdings are classified as non-monetary gold, then it is breaking the law if it cannot be tracked and traced.
At 25:11 they reference Howard Buffet writing that the convertibility of gold is essential to human freedom. I've attached a .pdf on Buffets 1948 article below. Buffet opens the article with:
Is there a connection between Human Freedom and A Gold Redeemable Money? At first glance it would seem that money belongs to the world of economics and human freedom to the political sphere.
But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty.
Also, when you find that Lenin declared and demonstrated that a sure way to overturn the existing social order and bring about communism was by printing press paper money, then again you are impressed with the possibility of a relationship between a gold-backed money and human freedom.
Lots more of interest in that interview for an understanding of the geo-political uses of gold.
Trump has indicated a number of times that it would be good to bring back the gold standard. In a 2015 GQ interview he said: " “Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful. We’d have a standard on which to base our money.” In another interview “We used to have a very, very solid country because it was based on a gold standard.” The problem with doing that seems to be that there isn't enough gold to in US holding to cover it's the US debt.
Whether bringing back the gold standard equates to returning to currency to gold convertability, I don't know.
Investing News Network covers the idea of returning to the gold standard
here.