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All parties have finally come to an agreement which was meant to be a solution for the crisis in Greece. That is, if you believe pumping more money in a bottomless pit can be described as a ‘sustainable’ solution. More money will be forked over to Greece, and the European Central Bank has announced it would increase the Emergency Lending Assistance to the Greek banks by almost 1B EUR [13] for the next week. That’s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but it’s an important signal towards Greece, as the ECB has repeatedly refused to increase the ELA ceiling
This should allow the Greek banks to open again after being closed for weeks in an attempt to establish capital controls.
The final negotiations took a while before they resulted in a proposal, but there’s one side of the story which hasn’t been highlighted at all by the mainstream media.
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Everybody knows Germany inserted a paragraph in the proposal which could allow Greece to temporary leave the Eurozone for a few years to get its ducks back in a row and to clean up its mess. However, few people know Germany was backed by other countries like Finland and The Netherlands.
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And yes, there is a link between those countries! Germany has started to repatriate its gold [14] from the vaults of the New York Fed where it had stored in excess of 1,400 tonnes of gold. Once the Germans had put a (temporary) Grexit on the table, it immediately enjoyed the support of the Fins, [15] as one of the coalition partners of the government threatened to bring the Finnish government down if the official Finnish standpoint would not include a more strict approach towards the Greeks.
And you might already guess it, indeed, Finland also was one of the countries which investigated to repatriate some of its gold as only 4% of its reserves [16] were located in Finland. Even though the Finnish national bank hasn’t released official updates on where exactly how much of its gold is located, we would not be surprised to see Finland announce it has repatriated some of its gold àfter it has done so.
The majority of the Finnish gold was stored at the Bank of England, and guess what? The Bank of England announced last month its customers withdrew in excess of 350 tonnes of gold [17] from its vaults. Who did withdraw the gold? Nobody knows, but those 11 million ounces will undoubtedly come to surface one day.
Just like number three in the list of the countries backing Germany’s point of view. Even though the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, is Dutch and belongs to a left-wing political party (PVDA, which basically means ‘Party of the Laborers’), he was one of the most fierce defenders of a strict approach towards Greece and strongly opposed all ‘softer’ approaches.
And guess what?
The Netherlands announced last year [18] it brought 120 tonnes gold home from the New York Fed to ‘increase the confidence of the people in the Dutch Central Bank’.
So the three countries which were leading the pack to impose even stricter measures on Greece were all countries which either did repatriate a large part of their gold, or have been seriously considering doing so.
What do they know that we don’t know? What else will the pro-gold countries try to accomplish in the (near) future?
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