Gold depository could soon be on its way to Texas
By Anna M. Tinsley - Star-Telegram
Tarek Saab has a golden vision for Texas. Well, for a Texas Bullion Depository anyway.
So he, and his company — Texas Precious Metals — set up a booth at the Republican Party of Texas state convention in Dallas to tell Texans about it.
“Texans as a group are some of the largest gold buyers in the world,” said Saab, chief operating officer of the company. “The only options they have to store it right now are in a bank or their home.”
Saab’s company, one of many interested in being involved with the state’s plan to create a depository, proposes building a potentially $20 million facility — with no Texas tax dollars — on 40 acres of land it has in Shiner, about 250 miles south of Fort Worth.
Plans for such a depository, where Texans could store their gold and precious metals, have been in the works since state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, asked lawmakers to create the facility last year.
Under the new Texas law, the comptroller’s office is working to create the state’s first bullion depository — which could hold deposits of gold and other precious metals from financial institutions, cities, school districts, businesses, individuals and countries — at a location yet to be determined.
Storage fees will be charged, perhaps generating revenue for the state. For instance, Texas pays about $1 million a year to store its gold in New York, and that revenue instead could come to Texas, state officials have said.
Capriglione and others say they want to bring home around $650 million owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Company that is stored at the HSBC Bank in New York. The company pays about $650,000 a year to store the gold in New York...
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/article77795702.htmlRELATED
Laying the Ground Work for Electronic Gold-Based "Money" Mises Institute - By Ryan McMaken
"...For one, many state politicians hope that the State of Texas will be able to relocate its own gold holdings into Texas from New York where it currently sits. The state spends a million dollars per year on its storage.
Moreover, existence of the depository opens up the possibilities for users creating a new type of currency in which purchases are made electronically with the backing of the gold in the depository. In other words, one could potentially use the depository's infrastructure to make purchases using gold, and to have gold either directly deposited into another's account, or converted to US dollars and deposited in a conventional bank. Arguably, this is just an electronic version of gold-backed money.
Ironically, Zero Interest Rate Policy Has Made Gold Depositories More Practical
And now more than ever, the idea of paying fees on gold deposits has become relatively economical thanks to near-zero interest rates on ordinary bank accounts. In ages past when banks actually paid meaningful interest on deposits, one might wonder why anyone would pay a fee to store gold when one could collect interest on cash at a bank.
Thanks to the central banks' commitment to near-zero or even negative interest rates, though, holding cash in a bank no longer brings any benefit in terms of investment earnings. That is, the opportunity cost of storing gold in a depository is getting lower and lower thanks to central bank policy..."
https://mises.org/blog/texan-plans-build-gold-depository
