Governments lose gold, people lose keys
By mbrooks on June 19, 2019
By Matthew Brooks
The search for lost property comes with a price. The effort costs us our time and effort, and possibly an amount of emotional frustration.
It can happen to anyone. Losing property even happens nations.
It is no secret that Venezuela is in a years’ long economic crisis. Less widely known is Venezuela’s efforts to sell off its gold reserves secretly to avoid U.S. sanctions. And now 7.4 tons of gold are missing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Somewhere between a Russian charter flight and a Ugandan refinery $300 million worth of gold disappeared.
For the rest of us, government special agents won’t be looking for our lost property.
Finding your lost keys
A professor of psychological and brain sciences offers tips on how to find what we’ve lost.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D is a professor emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Whitbourne offers tips on how to find what we’ve lost and prevent ourselves from losing things again.
- Be mindful in your daily tasks. Things get lost when we go through our daily routines without thinking about what we are doing.
- When you lose something, visualize what you were doing when your property went missing. It is important to not visualize what you usually do because if you had done what you usually do, it wouldn’t be lost.
- Have confidence in yourself. Believe that you can bring back to your memory what you have forgotten.
- Rely on the sympathy and honesty of others. Other people may have what we lost but do not know who to return it to.
The more actively you engage your cognitive processes the more able you will be to find what has gone missing.
For Venezuela, it has been selling off its gold for years but only now is it publicly known that the nation’s cognitive processes were less organized.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Venezuela has not kept its wealth under sufficient guard.
Venezuela has been in the business of selling off its gold from late 2017 to February 2019. In that time period, the central bank of Venezuela sold at least 73.3 tons of gold. The gold sold so far has a market value of around $3 billion.
Where did Venezuela acquire so much gold? An anonymous source who spoke to the Wall Street Journal says the gold came from the U.S. in exchange for oil during World War II.
