A Ton Of Gold Bricks: What Capital Flight Looks Like In Italy

Curious why so little has been said about cash flowing out of Italy's banks, especially when even UniCredit's CEO today proudly warned everyone he is all for confiscating uninsured deposits as long as "everyone else is doing it" - and no, he is not kidding, so when it does happen, nobody will be able to say they weren't warned. Maybe it is because Italian cash is actually not leaving the country at all. Instead, real "wealth" is departing the boot-shaped nation, quietly and under the radar, as fast as it can in another form: gold. As the clip below from Bloomberg shows, a car was intercepted at the Italy-Switzerland border, with a very special cargo: numerous bars of gold weighing a whopping one ton, worth $6 million. Furthermore, one can be absolutely certain that for every car that is caught at the border with a ton of "golden" cargo, there are 99 that pass through undisturbed and undetected. Which makes perfect sense: what better way to circumvent shadow capital controls such as those virtually everywhere in Europe, than to convert one's paper money within country A so it stays in country A, into a far more valuable, anonymous and transportable store of wealth, such as gold, and quietly move it to country B, the one where the risk of deposit confiscation is (for now at least) far less?

Oh, did we mention the confiscated product was gold: not euros, not Cypriot euros, not dollars, not palladium, not bitcoin... gold?

Comments

[SoundMoney45]

Here is an interesting TED video on cell phone location and other data collection in Germany 

http://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching.html

It is also interesting to note that the US FBI recently testified that it downloaded software to smartphones that allowed surreptious audio recording when the smartphone appeared to have been turned off.

Also, here is an interesting RT article on license plate scanners

http://rt.com/usa/license-plate-police-department-520/

[Handful of Dust]

Don't tell Charlie Munson about this...he'll get nervous.