Dutch Central Bank Admits It Has Prepared For A New Gold Standard

• Sorry, interview is in Dutch. The transcript in English is at end of article.
• Dutch Central Bank Admits It Has Prepared For A New Gold Standard
  by Jan Nieuwenhuijs, of Gainesville Coins
  In a recent interview the Dutch central bank (DNB) shares it has equalized its gold reserves, relative to GDP, to other countries in the eurozone and outside of Europe. This has been a political decision. If there is a financial crisis the gold price will skyrocket, and official gold reserves can be used to underpin a new gold standard, according to DNB. These statements confirm what I have been writing for the past years about central banks having prepared for a new international gold standard.
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  Wouldn’t a central bank that has one primary objective—maintaining price stability—serve its mandate best by communicating the currency it issues can be relied upon in all circumstances? By saying gold will be the safe haven of choice during a financial collapse, DNB confesses its own currency (the euro) does not weather all storms. Indirectly, DNB encourages people to own gold to be protected from financial shocks, making the transition towards a gold based monetary system more likely.
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  How to Prepare for a Gold Standard
  In my latest article on this subject—“Europe Has Been Preparing a Global Gold Standard Since the 1970s. Part 2”—I have demonstrated that central banks of medium and large economies in the eurozone have balanced their official gold reserves, proportionally to GDP, to prepare for a gold standard (/gold price targeting system). My analysis was pieced together by scarce quotes from central banks and data of European gold and foreign exchange holdings. My conclusion was that several medium-size economies in Europe (the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Portugal) sold large amounts of gold from the early 1990s to 2008 to come on par with France, Germany, and Italy. I wrote:
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  Seemingly there are guidelines in the eurozone for national central banks to hold an appropriate amount of gold relative to GDP.
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  In another article, I revealed that in the early 1990s the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) was buying the gold DNB was selling. By selling gold Europe was allowing developing countries to buy gold and come on par with the West. China too has expressed its desire to bring its gold holdings more in line with the size of its economy, just like the Europeans, and thus to international averages. From Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad in 1993:
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  Interview Transcript
  The interview with Aerdt Houben, Director of Financial Markets for DNB, was conducted by Anna Dijkman from Het Financieele Dagblad. The following is a translation of the most important part of the conversation (in the first segment we hear Dijkman make a few comments for the listener in between Houben’s talk):
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  HOUBEN: 612 tonnes of gold. That’s our total holdings. It’s worth about €35 billion euros at the moment and we have diversified it around the world, as a good investor should. We’ve spread it over four locations, with about 30% in the Netherlands, just over 30% in New York at the Federal Reserve, over 20% in Canada and 18% in London.
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  The gold really goes way back. At the end of the nineteenth century DNB started accumulating gold, which was important to establish confidence in our currency.
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  read more.

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