Germany: the financial enemy within

Yesterday, the newspapers stated that:

“Germany’s central bank said it would repatriate some of its gold reserves from France and the U.S., bowing to pressure both from Berlin and from a remarkable grass-roots campaign by the populist press, which played on fears that the euro crisis poses a risk to Germans’ financial well-being”

I.e: Germany is repatriating 150 billion worth of gold.

Exactly the same day the German Statistisches Bundesamt stated that in the third quarter of 2012 German public debt increased quite a bit, despite a surplus of the central government, largely because of

“einen Anstieg der Verschuldung bei der Ersten Abwicklungsanstalt (EAA) durch die Übernahme des letzten Portfolios der ehemaligen WestLB AG”

EAA? WestLB AG? I decided to do a quick google search. No surprises: WestLB AG was a bank which, after a lot of hubris, went broke. The German government accepted 85 billions worth of bad assets and took over a lot of debts from this bank. One bank, 85 billions of bad assets – that’s more than the entire Greek government deficit in the three years 2009-2011. The Germans might indeed need the gold, soon (google ‘Deutsche Bank’ and ‘fraud’).

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