Sources: SWIFT System Under Constant Cyber Attack

Sources: SWIFT System Under Constant Cyber Attack

 

(LONDON) Cyber attacks targeting the global bank transfer system have succeeded in stealing funds since February’s heist of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank as hackers have become more sophisticated in their tactics, according to a SWIFT official and a previously undisclosed letter the organization sent to banks worldwide.

• The messaging network in a Nov. 2 letter seen by Reuters warned banks of the escalating threat to their systems, according to the SWIFT letter.
• The attacks and new hacking tactics underscore the continuing vulnerability of the SWIFT messaging network, which handles trillions of dollars in fund transfers daily.
• “The threat is very persistent, adaptive and sophisticated – and it is here to stay,” SWIFT said in the November letter to client banks, seen by Reuters.

European Central Bank gold reserves held across 5 locations. ECB will not disclose Gold Bar List.

Table 1: Central bank FX and Gold transfers to the ECB, January 1999

 

The European Central Bank (ECB), creator of the Euro, currently claims to hold 504.8 tonnes of gold reserves. These gold holdings are reflected on the ECB balance sheet and arose from transfers made to the ECB by Euro member national central banks, mainly in January 1999 at the birth of the Euro. As of the end of December 2015, these ECB gold reserves were valued on the ECB balance sheet at market prices and amounted to €15.79 billion. 

The ECB very recently confirmed to BullionStar that its gold reserves are stored across 5 international locations. However, the ECB also confirmed that it does not physically audit its gold, nor will it divulge a bar list / weight list of these gold bar holdings.

Questions and Answers

BullionStar recently put a number of questions to the European Central Bank about the ECB’s gold holdings. The ECB Communications Directorate replied to these questions with answers that appear to include a number of facts about the ECB gold reserves which have not previously been published. The questions put to the ECB and its responses are listed below (underlining added):

Update on Bundesbank Gold Repatriation 2015

Source: Bundesbank

 

Deutsche Bundesbank has just released a progress report on its gold bar repatriation programme for 2015 – “Frankfurt becomes Bundesbank’s largest gold storage location“.

…

As a reminder, the Bundesbank is engaged in an unusual multi-year repatriation programme to transport 300 tonnes of gold back to Frankfurt from the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), and simultaneously to bring back 374 tonnes of gold back to Frankfurt from the vaults of the Banque de France in Paris. This programme began in 2013 and is scheduled to complete by 2020. I use the word ‘unusual’ because the Bundesbank could technically transport all 674 tonnes of this gold back to Frankfurt in a few weeks or less if it really wanted to, so there are undoubtedly some unpublished limitations as to why the German central bank has not yet done so.

Fed official warns ‘flash crash’ could be repeated

Please see the source for the video.

 

A senior Federal Reserve official has warned that last autumn’s “flash crash” in US Treasurys could happen again due to the changing nature of the US government debt market, and urged banks, investors and exchanges to adopt a revised set of guidelines in response to the turmoil.

…

However, Simon Potter, executive vice-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, warned in a speech on Monday that the unintended consequences of regulatory and market changes could mean that “that sharp intraday price moves become more common” in the future.

Where Is Germany’s Gold?

Almost half of Germany’s gold is stored in vaults under the streets of Manhattan. Or is it?

Peter Boehringer hates the word “conspiracy.” It implies something crazy, and if you spend even a little time with the 45-year-old German, it becomes clear he’s driven by a desire for order. On a recent morning in Munich, he’s dressed in a cobalt blue shirt that matches his blue tie and blue eyes. His black hair is cropped close above his receded hairline. In his gray Volkswagen minivan, the cup holder contains two identical water bottles, each filled to the same level. At the end of a daylong interview, for which Boehringer has arranged an hour-by-hour itinerary, he sends a follow-up e-mail with a numbered summation of points he’s made. No. 2 says that the crusade he’s been waging for the last three years is simply about transparency. “Questions,” he writes, “by definition cannot be ‘conspiracy theories.’ ”

Boehringer is a gold bug, a member of the impassioned tribe of investors and academics who distrust central banks and paper money, unless the governments that print it will exchange the cash for gold or silver from their vaults. He has an asset management firm that invests his own money and that of clients in gold, silver, and mining stocks, and he’s a founder of the nonprofit German Precious Metal Society, which educates the public about “the craziness of unbacked monetary systems,” he says. In short, Boehringer is worried that the global economy is built on a fiction of currencies that aren’t backed by precious metals. Which is why he set out to make sure the gold that Germany and other nations say they have actually exists.

Russian companies withdraw billions from west, say Moscow bankers

Russian companies are pulling billions out of western banks, fearful that any US sanctions over the Crimean crisis could lead to an asset freeze, according to bankers in Moscow.

Sberbank and VTB, Russia’s giant partly state-owned banks, as well as industrial companies, such as energy group Lukoil, are among those repatriating cash from western lenders with operations in the US. VTB has also cancelled a planned US investor summit next month, according to bankers.

Putin’s KGB/FSB Converging with New IMF Banking FSB

The veterans of Russia’s KGB/FSB were chuckling to themselves, no doubt, as Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) announced his pleasure at Russia’s assumption of the presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20)* nations for 2013. Putin’s “strategic agenda proposed by Russia for the G20 in 2013” is loaded with favorable references to the FSB. The FSB acronym in Putin’s “strategic agenda” is not a reference to the dreaded Russian secret police (successor to the Soviet KGB and its earlier incarnations as the NKVD and the Cheka), however; it is a reference to the Financial Stability Board, a new institution created by the G20 leaders in 2009, ostensibly to deal with the economic crisis.

Nevertheless, the “coincidence” of choosing a name for this new, secretive global financial police with the same acronym as the Putin’s feared agency is oddly apropos. The G20’s FSB is a shadowy financial power that is headquartered inside another even more secretive, shadowy global financial powerbase, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland.Despite repeated appeals to accountability and transparency in the FSB Charter, the FSB — like the BIS and the Central Banks whose heads compose the Plenary that governs the FSB — operates in murky opaqueness, outside the controls of the U.S. Congress, national parliaments, or any constitutional constraints.

Turk – 15,000 Tons Of Western Central Bank Gold Is Gone

Today James Turk once again shocked King World News when he stated, “… in 1997 over (a stunning) 2,000 tons of gold moved out of Great Britain.”  Turk added, “Now since Great Britain is not a gold miner, we know that gold had to come out of the Bank of England (where they store other countries gold), and it probably went into Zurich (Switzerland) for what’s called ‘leasing’ but I use the word ‘lending,’ or lending into the market.”

But first, here is what Turk had to say about his last interview titled, “The Entire German Gold Hoard Is Gone,” which has received an incredible amount of attention around the world:  “Yes, it’s getting increasing attention, Eric, and rightly so.  There has been a lot of deception about how much gold is really in central bank vaults.

The reason why there is this deception, if you look at a balance sheet of a central bank like the Bundesbank, Bank of Italy or the Bank of England, they basically say gold in the vault and gold out on loan, they show it as one line item.  They call it, ‘gold and gold receivables.’

Anybody who understands generally accepted accounting principles knows that ‘cash’ is different from an ‘account receivable.’