I have been wondering why the cartel/Fed haven't been using the pending IMF gold sales as a sledge hammer to further drive down the price of gold. Today gold held up well and they had to switch to driving down the price of silver. Maybe the IMF gold sales are an empty threat. The following is an excerpt from GATA's le Metropole Cafe provided by Nick from Jo'berg.

"The IMF gold reserves are currently reported at 3,217 tons. Give me a break on this one. Is there anybody so naïve as to believe that the 403 tons of gold that accrued to the IMF in trading activities after the Second Amendment and was subsequently stored with custodians closely associated with the heart of the cartel is still physically present and unencumbered. The (many times) proposed sale of this IMF gold will merely be represented by the close out of various swap/lease transactions with no physical gold available to hit the spot market. There could be a very real problem if any major investor decides (now that this IMF gold is allegedly in play again) to chase the physical purchase of this non existent IMF gold AND MOREOVER IS INTENT ON TAKING PHYSICAL DELIVERY.

As for the remaining +2,800 tons of IMF gold, all the evidence available suggests that this gold was only quota pledges of gold in the seventies and not physical transfers of gold to the independent custodianship of the IMF (which itself acknowledges that this "gold" is stored , once again, by the major players in the gold suppression scheme.) The worst case scenario (which I believe to be the closest to the truth , after hours of research) is that not only does the IMF own absolutely NO physical gold hoardings, but this alleged gold hoarding has ALWAYS BEEN DOUBLE COUNTED AS PART OF THE CONTINUING PHYSICAL GOLD RESERVES OF THOSE WESTERN CENTRAL BANKS THAT MADE THESE HISTORIC PLEDGES. There is nobody willing or able to prove this hypothesis to be wrong. But the IMF press officer gave GATAs’ Chris Powell some
vague assurances that the IMF did indeed own physical gold, that is now, as always, safely stored with those selfsame custodians who have supplied the cartel all these years; so what can go wrong?

There has been some recent speculation that the Germans want their physical gold returned from the USA. Germany has a reported gold hoarding of 3,412 tons. In 2006, Axel Weber all but admitted that the Bundesbank had engaged in some gold swaps. The best case scenario is that Germany now wants only a return of the physical gold involved in those 2006 temporary gold swaps. The public certainly has no access to the amount of physical gold involved. The worse case scenario is that a substantial amount (or maybe most) of German Central Bank gold hoardings is not physically stored where it should be-bad luck Germany-any gold in this category is now relegated to the ranks of worthless paper gold pledges, which can now never be honoured in respect of delivery of physical gold.

Finally if you believe that the French, Italian and Japanese Central Banks have in there possession all the physical unencumbered vault gold holdings that have been reported for the last few decades, you must be one of the most trusting and fatally naive and plain dumbest people on the entire planet!

Last but not least, if you believe that the COMEX is still good for any sizeable deliveries of physical gold (or silver), then I profusely apologize to those people whom ,in the last paragraph, I have branded as the most stupid on the planet. Those believers in the integrity of the COMEX have full lien on this description."
Regards
Nicholas