International Monitoring group has done an assessment of institutional banking and the risks faced by Y2K. They considered 5 major risks: operational, custodial, legal, replacement, and price. The report is dry and technical, but it reveals a who lot of risk the world financial SYSTEM faces and it is well worth reading.

However, the penultimate paragraph is anything but dry. In fact, it woke me up!

"Y2K related financial gridlock due to Herstatt risk could be on the order of trillions of dollars involving multiple large or small institutional bank failures, due to liquidity problems and/or one of the 5 risks mentioned.....The potential for a situation similar to Bankhaus Herstatt in 1974 could pose THE MOST SIGNIFICANT RISK TO THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY SYSTEM SEEN TO DATE. Unfortunately, neither the BIS, IMF, Global 200 working groups, nor the Worldbank has a fully co-ordinated crisis response plan for such situations." (Emphasis added).

Now the REAL clincher is the last paragraph. And here you would have to had looked over the entire report to comprehend the shock value of it all. The report droned on and on using all kinds of terms known only to those in the world of high finance. There was nothing particularly apocalyptic about anything I read, until the last two paragraphs. Nor was there any mention at all of gold. But here is the last paragraph:

"According to the World Gold Council, the World's central banks control 34,000 tons of gold.....In the face of partial demonetisation of economies, maybe these goldbugs aren't so off base." (page 30).

-- B. Webert (webert01@hotmail.com), September 30, 1999

Answers

Interesting... I think...could you explain in my language?? And do you have a link?

-- Taz (Taz@aol.com), September 30, 1999.

I understand--some of the terms are foreign to me too. But after literally scores of pages of analysis of the world of high finance, the ways for financial insitutions to hold it all together, graphs, displays, anayses ad nauseum, and then to come to the "bottom line" and read that holding gold is not such a bad idea....I about flipped!

At any rate, sorry about not posting the link. Here it is:

http://www.intl-monitoring.com/banking.htm

Let me know what you think. You need Adobe Acrobat.

BW

p.s. Do you have any idea how many (few) people read this formu? I am continually suprised by the lack of traffic.

-- B. Webert (webert01@hotmail.com), September 30, 1999.

I suspect that a lot of the people don't know about it and then the scope is limited. TB2000 is so full now days, that I haven't even been able to get on to it. I like that forum because the info is coming at you from all over, plus a lot of the OT is real interesting. For example, I wanted to get the forum's take on the nucke accident in Japan.

-- Taz (Taz@aol.com), September 30, 1999.

While my personal finances are anything but high, I probably can help you with some of the terminology. Also, pages 38 - 40 are a glossary of terms.

-- Jay Golter (Jgolter@aol.com), October 14, 1999.