Submitted by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
We warn regularly of the risk involved in storing wealth in banks. They’ve made the removal of your deposits increasingly difficult in addition to colluding with governments to allow them to legally freeze or confiscate your money. To add insult to injury, they’re creating reporting requirements with regard to the contents of safe deposit boxes and restricting what can be stored in them – again, at risk of confiscation.
More and more, banks are becoming one of the more risky places to store wealth in any form. Not surprising, then, that many people are returning to those facilities that treat wealth storage the way the first banks did millennia ago – vault facilities that store your wealth for a fee but engage in no other banking activities.
But, in suggesting to our readers that such facilities are a better bet, I’ve also repeatedly warned readers that many such facilities don’t store actual, physical gold. They instead provide a contract to you that states that they will deliver an agreed-upon amount of gold upon demand. The trouble with this idea is that it becomes tempting for such facilities to sign such a contract with you and collect the purchase price but never actually purchase and store any gold.