Sunday, April 17, 2011

Whoa! University of Texas Takes Delivery of a Billion Dollars Worth of Gold

This is going to cause a few more people to take a look at gold as an investment. (And make overseas investors even more nervous about the dollar)

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board, reports Bloomberg.

The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced, according to Bloomberg, by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said yesterday at its annual meeting. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime- mortgage collapse.

“Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services,” Bass said today in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”

The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University’s endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, last year added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment’s chief executive officer. The holdings reached about $987 million yesterday, as Comex futures closed at $1,486 an ounce.

The endowment, which oversees funds held by the University of Texas System and Texas A&M University, has 6,643 bars of bullion, or 664,300 ounces, in a Comex-registered vault in New York owned by HSBC Holdings Plc, the London-based bank, according to a report distributed at yesterday’s meeting in Austin.

Contrast this investment against the trades made by Harvard under the then-guidance of former Obama advisor Larry Summers, where Harvard's derivative trading resulted in billions in losses.

(Thanks2VireshAmin)

8 comments:

  1. There is no information when previous investments has been made, so from the investor perspective, they're buying at the peek (yesterday was gold's all time high).

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  2. Anonymous (4:02 a.m.), it makes you wonder who the seller(s) is (are), doesn't it?

    Also, it's interesting to see yet another goldbug repeating the poetic account of reserve and deposit expansion:

    "Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services. I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of."

    Of course the central bank of Bass' own territory does no such thing as print money. In fact, it's the BEP which does so, and at its second facility in Texas, no less. So either Bass is dumbing things down or he doesn't know what he's talking about.

    But at least another group of tax-advantaged and taxpayer subsidized knaves are protected in case of hyperinflation. Attaboy, Kyle Bass!

    Maybe Bass' next move is to recommend that UT refuse any and all subsidies. And why shouldn't UT refuse subsidization? It has an enourmous endowment, and students should be paying their own tuition, anyway.

    Yeah, right. That'll happen.

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  3. Just because they took delivery recently doesn't mean they haven't had that position for some time. Kyle Bass has been bullish on gold for quite some time

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  4. Good point Danger Pioneer. In fact, Bass is a clever fellow, so it's quite possible that he advised UTIMCo to buy gold a little at a time, so as not to attract attention, to keep acquisition cost down, and so on.

    -Anonymous (9:57 am)

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  5. I sure wish they did not park the bullion in the hands of HSBC, the other member of The Fed's/Treasury's gold-capping cabal (J.P. Morgan is the other).

    I sure hope that U.T. has read the fine print on the storage contract (i.e., allocated), and has plans set to loose the Texas Rangers on the banksters/Israeli mafia if they try to stiff U.T. on their gold.

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  6. The University of Texas is an economic terrorist! How utterly unpatriotic to not trust the mighty US Dollar. Anyway, everyone knows that gold is a barbarous relic, and only wing nuts like Ron Paul talk about gold. It seems as if Texas is begging to be put on the "To Be Bombed" List.

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  7. Why in the world would they store it in a vault in New York?

    I think that the more intelligent move would be to have it in Texas.

    As the saying goes, "If you do not have physical possession of your precious metals, you do not own them."

    Unless, of course, this is just another one of those schemes for the international thieves (bankers) to make a major robbery in plain sight.

    Bob

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  8. They were smart enough to buy it and take delivery. I just hope they are smart enough to have it assayed and moved to an undisclosed vault in Texas.

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