President Obama has ordered that Operation Lone Star Freedom will commence at zero-four-thirty hours Central Daylight Time.
To the long-suffering and oppressed people of Texas: We come not as invaders, but as liberators!
As Whack-a-Mole noted above, the gold is owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Company. This is a corporation which handles investments for the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. UTIMCO’s board of directors is appointed by the boards of those two universities. The members of those university boards are appointed by the Governor. So while the ownership is indirect, I think it’s reasonable to say the state of Texas owns the gold in question.
Well, for one no one is on the gold standard anymore.
I’d like a legal opinion from someone qualified to say so. Not dissing your opinion.
You know, it’s stories like this one which confirm my belief that the US, and particularly Texas, are really just one big reality show to entertain the rest of the world.
Nothing new there. Howdy, Comrade!
Endowments belong to the universities as charitable endeavors, rather than to the state. So the governor is sort-of in charge of the funds in his role as the head of the Texas university system rather than qua governor.
Under Texas law (Tex. Prop. Code §163.005, et seq.), endowment funds are subject to the management of the institution, and may not be spent for purposes other than the “charitable purposes of the institution.” So the governor can’t spend or seize the UT endowment. Most large gifts also come with strings attached by the donor (must be spent upgrading the football stadium, building a new library wing, funding an underwater basket-weaving chair, whatever) which can only be relaxed by court order and only if impracticable (say, the school shuts down its basket weaving department.)
There are also federal tax implications if the money is moved from the university.
I would not say the money is “owned” by the State of Texas, since the state has no direct control over it. Rather, I would say the money is owned by the semi-autonomous state universities. If there was an “endowment” for the Texas Rangers or some other state agency that was not quasi-independent it might be different.
I kept saying to myself: This has to be a satiric article. It’s marked “Opinion.” The writer is doing a spoof on Jade Helm and other paranoias. This cannot be real.
I have no other comment. My head has exploded.
The article in the OP does not allow copying.
Briefly, the rep behind this is Giovanni Capriglione, an MBA private equity manager who got elected with Tea Party backing. His initial try at the concept, last session, failed after it was realized how much setting up a secure depository would cost.
So his new plan is to have everything outsourced & privatized. What could possibly go wrong?
I thought that the rule laid down in Lincoln v Davis et al was that if a State gets too upitty it gets pounded.
Blog at the Washington Post provides a little more information:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/texas-wants-its-gold-back-wait-what/
I liked this bit:
Germany can move its gold wherever it wants to. And Texas can move its gold wherever it wants to.
The point, which has been noted repeatedly, is that Texas doesn’t want to move the gold it owns. Texas wants to keep that gold in New York. It wants the federal government to give it gold to keep in Texas.
A few thinsg which are hilarious: “…Paper currency issued by the Federal Reserve - or “Yankee dollars” as one of the law’s top supporters calls them.”:rolleyes::eek:
“And in case the Fed or Obama wants to confiscate Texas’s gold, nice try Fed and Obama! In keeping with this suspicion of the Fed and Washington, the new law also explicitly declares that no “governmental or quasi-governmental authority other than an authority of [Texas]” will be allowed to confiscate or freeze an account inside the depository. Gold that’s entrusted to Texas will stay in Texas.” Yeah. Try this Texas:
" This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Here’s another cool thing for the gold bugs: “Over more than four years that just a 3% gain for the fund before you account for the cost of housing the gold in New York and the transaction costs that will be incurred if and when the endowment fund ships the bars back to Texas or sells them to a buyer. Over the same period, the S&P 500 index - a broad measure of owning stocks - gained 60%.”
In other word- they *lost money investing in gold. * Net.
Who needs “money”?! They have gold!
ahem Post #5 by yours truly.
Good grief! I didn’t think it was possible to have a governor MORE embarrassing than Rick Perry.
First Jade Helm, now this.
Reading through it, I just discovered another amazing thing - the ‘local businesses’ they’re talking about? “IT security companies with underground storage facilities for data centers”. Seriously, they’re suggesting that these companies convert some of their unused server rooms into gold storage.
“Oh yeah, we don’t use this space much - over here is the mail server, this rack is the internal database cluster, and over in the back corner is fifteen million dollars worth of gold bars.”
Wat.
Texas gold storage is currently outsourced and privatized with HSBC. That’s not the issue.
It certainly illustrates the issue. Their current outsourcing of their gold storage to a private entity is costing them more than a hundred times as much as if they let the Fed guard it.
I think it’s obvious that if they outsource the storage of their gold to some less reputable and deep-pocketed outfit than HSBC, the storage costs could end up being the least of their problems.