Ron Paul doesn’t have a lot of friends at the US Treasury, particularly now that he is the Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy. His relatively high profile hearings regarding the US gold reserves – and insinuations that perhaps all is not as it seems – have made a lot of people wish the whole thing would just go away. That fact is, their desire is easily accomplished: simply provide transparent answers and information to back their claims regarding the gold. Let anyone who cares see for themselves that everything is accounted for, and whole issue evaporates instantly.
The two clips below are from the June 23 hearings with the US Treasury Inspector General Eric Thorson. The question being asked is painfully simple: where is the physical gold pledged by the US to the IMF and how is it accounted for on the balance sheet? If you can make it through all nine minutes you’ll witness Mr. Thorson pretend not to understand the question, answer a completely different question, and ramble off on items completely unrelated to the topic at hand. It’s about as non-transparent as it gets.
The whole thing reminds me of the infamous questioning of the Federal Reserve Inspector General by Alan Grayson. She too was unable to answer simple questions about the Fed’s balance sheet. In the time since, we’ve come to learn why; the Fed took it upon itself to bail out a whole slew of foreign banks and corporations at the US taxpayers expense.
