Land Of The Free Does It Again
A “Red Alert” from “Simon Black” this morning indicated that in mid 2013 VIAMAT will be forcing all U.S. customers to ship their gold somewhere else, they will be persona non grata due to threat of U.S. pressure on tax issues. Uncle Sam fears that owners of gold will sell at a profit (no duh!) and not report that gain.
How that affects VIAMAT is a bit beyond me, an individual customer would likely REMOVE their gold from VIAMAT before selling it and incurring tax liability, but who knows, perhaps I misunderstand the intent.
Either way, Simon Black is suggesting its only a matter of time before this trickles down to customers of customers of VIAMAT including GoldMoney, BullionVault, and Global Gold. Simon is suggesting using private storage in Singapore instead and supposedly has no financial interest in recommending that.
Personally I feel it’s a bit of a stretch to expect that trickle down since VIAMAT does not know who the customers of their customers are.
And, indeed, that is the essence of the response I promptly received from Global Gold this morning:
So far none of our clients are affected by this. It’s our understanding that this has been a precautious measure by ViaMat because they have also operations in the USA. Although they are operating separate from each other under a holding structure, they wanted to protect themselves from US government pressures.
Our customers are still safe because Global Gold doesn’t disclose the names of our customers and are operating under Swiss law. Important is that Global Gold, an all Swiss Company has the contract with ViaMat, while you have the contract with Global Gold.
Global Gold also doesn’t’ have any subsidiaries outside of Switzerland and this is an extra secure point.
I hope this clarifies. Should there be any changes, we will of course let our clients know.
In my mind this is just another nail in the coffin of freedom in the United States, though. Simon Black is correct that this type of anal behavior by the US Government amounts to defacto capital controls.
Add to that the difficulty of renouncing citizenship, being forced to stay in the tax system for a decade after leaving the U.S. and it really makes it tough for an honest, informed person to say that the United States has much remnant left of being “The Land of the Free”, even if one does live in Texas.
Unfortunately, Texas citizens are treated the same by foreign governments and firms as someone from, say, the Peoples Republics of Californistan, New Yorkistan, or ILL-inoisistan.
One answer, of course, is just to use a U.S. firm to buy and store gold like Hard Assets Alliance
