Government Gold - Is History Repeating Itself?

I came across something today that seemed familiar and at the same time very suspicious. Most everybody reading this is probably aware of this particular piece of history but for the sake of anybody that is not aware of this I’m going to go over it anyway before I mention the interesting news that I received today.

During the Great Depression, one of the policies that was passed under Roosevelt was the confiscating of all the gold in the country by the government. The only gold that was allowed to be kept was collectable coins, which interestingly enough was what Roosevelt himself had invested much money in as had many of his friends. When this policy passed everybody had 30 days to turn it in and after that point if you were caught with gold, it was considered contraband. And you could get in some serious trouble for owning it.

Now fast forward to today. Today I was talking with a broker who works for a very large gold brokerage. As we talked about different forms of gold that you can buy, such as bullion, collectable coins, international gold coins, US government gold coins, and so on, the topic of conversation gradually moved to how much money that some people put into gold investments.
He happened to mention that many of the law-makers in Washington invest huge amounts of money in gold. That in itself didn’t surprise me, but one thing that he did mention that I found very interesting was that, in the last several month, he said, they have been avoiding bullion like it was the plague. As a matter of fact the ones who had invested much in gold bullion had sold it and were now buying, you guessed it, collectable coins.

Does this mean anything? I don’t know. I mean, hey, we all know that the government would never take advantage of us, right? (In case you're wondering, no I haven't lost my mind. Sometimes I can be slightly sarcastic.) But when looking at history, and the fact that since we have printed out such huge amounts of our money, it has resulted in loss of value of the dollar, I sure do find it interesting. It kind of makes you wonder if the government is looking to once again collect it’s citizens gold, while keeping the loophole of collectable coins open.

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