You are insufficiently paranoid
Melvin Loh said:
Has anybody read this new book by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave yet ? It's all about the fortune plundered by the Japs from thruout their WWII empire and secretly stashed and buried in concealed locations thruout the Philippines (Op 'Golden Lily), then later about how the US govt managed to acquire the treasure and use this 'black gold' to further their own nefarious and dubious ends after the war, such as bribing Tokyo war crimes trial witnesses to falsify their testimonies in the trials of key right-wing Jap govt officials, to pay off members of Unit 731, and for the CIA to finance their covert ops in SE Asia from 1845 onwards. Puts a very different spin on the story of looted treasures from the Pacific War, in much the same war as books written in the 90s did re Nazi wartime looting and the collaboration of the Swiss banks in laundering these ill-gotten gains.
This whole Japanese gold thing is just a scam. As if the conservatives that took over after Roosevelt died would take all that looted Chinese gold and silver in exchange for letting off the war criminals. What really happened is that in 1980 the incoming Republican presidential administration sold off our gold reserves at the top of the market at 800$ a troy ounce in 1980 dollars.
Then they bought thirty year treasury bonds at 21% interest because they knew that they were going to hike interest rates and hold a recession to stop inflation. They made huge amounts of money in the bond market rally when the high interest rate bonds (that paid a high interest rate because everyone was expecting inflation to continue) quadrupled in value in those two years.
Meanwhile the increase in real interest rates (interest minus inflation) had crashed the stock market, bottoming out in 1982. They bought at the bottom and made even more money. Brilliant!
They ran those huge Reagan deficits because they knew that they had the money from selling off the gold reserves to pay for them, so when the Democrats claim that the Republicans ran up more deficits in 12 years than the rest of the history of the US, the Republicans were laughing at them!
Then after Greenspan rigged the market to crest at 2000, they sold out the stock market to the dumb foreigners during the run up, and now the US doesn't really have a balance of trade deficit because it's just our money coming back!
Problem is, we've pretty much run out of all the money from the scam. A balance of trade crisis is coming soon. But they had a good twenty year run out of the gold reserves, and it's going to be the Pentagon's problem when the gold isn't there to keep the spare parts supply going. It's tough to handle without being able to buy stuff overseas. Too bad!
And if you believe this, you are sufficiently paranoid. I make no guarantees as to the truth of what I've posted. It's just one more scenario. Not the most unlikely one because it does account for all motives and happenings. It could be worse than what occured, it could be better, for your values of worse and better.