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This is the post where Timber1956 has to fess up to his mistakes.
Several days ago I posted:
The numbers were correct, but the assumptions were wrong.
When I first looked at the Swiss Referendum, I looked at a German-English translation of the referendum question that said "The proposal would require the Swiss National Bank to have gold reserves of at least 20% of the value of the currency in circulation", and I used that assumption in the table above to calculated required gold.
I should have smelt a rat.
After thinking about how unlikely such a referendum would be I went back to the original German version of the Referendum from the Swiss government (http://www.bk.admin.ch/themen/pore/va/20141130/index.html?lang=de) and did my own translation:
"Die Volksinitiative verlangt, dass der Goldanteil an den Aktiven der Nationalbank auf mindestens 20 Prozent erhöht wird."
"The initiative requires that the gold content is increased in the assets of the National Bank at least 20%."
This very different meaning produces very different analysis.
Anyone can be caught out by a bad translation, but I posted without giving sufficient consideration the reasonableness of the data. That is sloppy work and embarrassing given that I regularly criticise other HC contributors for doing the same thing.
