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Texas university endowment's gold investment will prompt others, Lassonde tells King World News

Section: Daily Dispatches

9:11p ET Saturday, April 16, 2011

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Interviewed today by King World News, gold mining entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde predicts that the huge investment in gold by the endowment fund of the University of Texas will prompt other institutional investors to invest in real metal. An excerpt from the interview has been posted at the King World News blog here:

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2011/4/16_Pi...

A Bloomberg News report about the investment is appended.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

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Texas University Endowment Storing About $1 Billion in Gold Bars

By David Mildenberg and Pham-Duy Nguyen
Bloomberg News
Friday, April 15, 2011

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-15/texas-university-endowment-hold...

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion as the metal reaches a record, according to the fund's board.

The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University's endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, last year added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment's chief executive officer. The holdings reached about $987 million yesterday, as Comex futures closed at $1,486 an ounce.

... Dispatch continues below ...



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Sona Drills 85.4g Gold/Ton Over 4 Metres at Elizabeth Gold Deposit,
Extending the Mineralization of the Southwest Vein on the Property

Company Press Release, October 27, 2010

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Sona Resources Corp. reports on five drillling holes in the third round of assay results from the recently completed drill program at its 100 percent-owned Elizabeth Gold Deposit Property in the Lillooet Mining District of southern British Columbia. Highlights from the diamond drilling include:

-- Hole E10-66 intersected 17.4g gold/ton over 1.54 metres.

-- Hole E10-67 intersected 96.4g gold/ton over 2.5 metres, including one assay interval of 383g of gold/ton over 0.5 metres.

-- Hole E10-69 intersected 85.4g gold/ton over 4.03 metres, including one assay interval of 230g gold/ton over 1 metre.

Four drill holes, E10-66 to E10-69, targeted the southwestern end of the Southwest Vein, and three of the holes have expanded the mineralized zone in that direction. The Southwest Vein gold mineralization has now been intersected over a strike length of 325 metres, with the deepest hole drilled less than 200 metres from surface.

"The assay results from the Southwest Zone quartz vein continue to be extremely positive," says John P. Thompson, Sona's president and CEO. "We are expanding the Southwest Vein, and this high-grade gold mineralization remains wide open down dip and along strike to the southwest."

For the company's full press release, please visit:

http://sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR19_2010.pdf



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 yesterday at its annual meeting. 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 today in a telephone interview. "I look at gold as just another currency that they can't print any more of."

Gold reached an all-time high of $1,489.10 an ounce today in New York as sovereign debt concerns boosted demand for the metal as a store of value. Gold has climbed 28 percent in the past year on Comex.

The endowment, which oversees funds held by the University of Texas System and Texas A&M University, has 6,643 bars of bullion, or 664,300 ounces, in a Comex-registered vault in New York owned by HSBC Holdings Plc, the London-based bank, according to a report distributed at yesterday’s meeting in Austin.

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Friday, April 29, 2011
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