And, like everything in Texas, they do it BIG:

From Bloomberg:

    The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board.
    The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said at its annual meeting on April 14. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.
    “Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services,” Bass said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”

How about that: to a Texan, Gold Is Money. And not even a central banker can print gold, though I suspect that a lot of people who haven’t taken delivery but instead own paper “golden promises” are going to find out that the central banksters have been trying very hard to do just that. It appears that the University of Texas has taken possession of gold in allocated form, which means there are actual numbered gold bars in the vault that they are the registered owner of. This is a very important distinction. Many folks don’t know, but many other forms of gold investments consist not of actual physical gold, but rather are promises to deliver gold. This means, for example, if the company in which you’re invested goes bankrupt because they have over-promised, you are nothing more than an unsecured creditor to the bankruptcy court. Or, if your investment company has merely invested your dollars in long futures contracts, and the exchange goes bust (a “Commercial Signal Failure.” HaHaHa), good luck getting your gold.

I applaud Mr. Bass and the University of Texas for their wisdom in taking necessary steps to help protect the UT Endowment from the ravages of the money-printers at the Federal Reserve Bank. Perhaps some day we can have real money right here in Virginia.

P.S.: Why anyone would want to SELL gold in this environment is completely beyond me.