There’s a Pile of Gold in Manhattan. Texas Wants It Back. | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

Wonder if they will get it back

Texas wants its gold back from the Yankees, wherever they’re keeping it.

Governor Greg Abbott signed a law last week to build a depository for its 5,600 bars of the precious metal and, as he said in a statement, “repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York.”

The gold, it turns out, isn’t at the New York Fed -- it’s in a rented vault in midtown Manhattan -- and is worth about $650 million. Regardless, Texas aims to bring it home.

“We want to show off our strength and resilience,” said Giovanni Capriglione, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored the repatriation bill. “This is to be able to say, ‘Hey, listen, Texas is unique, it’s stable, it’s strong and we can show that by letting other states and individuals know that, yes, Texas has a billion dollars worth of gold. Does your state have a billion dollars worth of gold?’”

Informed that the value is about $350 million short of that, Capriglione said he was no less proud.

The gold in question isn’t the property of the state itself but of the University of Texas Investment Management Co., which oversees the second-largest academic endowment in the country.

That isn’t likely to diminish what Philip Diehl, a former director of the U.S. Mint, called “a wonderful marketing opportunity” for the state, where the electorate leans right.

For the governor and lawmakers, repatriation “makes a lot of political sense,” said Diehl, president of U.S. Money Reserve, an Austin company that sells gold. “It’s a very reasonable response to their constituents.”

http://www.bloomberg.....s-it-back-

An interesting read

http://www.bloomberg.....ts-results