Chavez Wants To Move Venezuelan Gold Home

All Things Considered:

Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez has announced that he wants all of the country's holdings in gold to be physically transferred to his country. That's more than $12 billion worth of gold. And the prospects for shipping it fill our heads with all kinds of James Bond-ish ideas.
Well, Jack Farchy wrote about this for the Financial Times. And, Jack, we're talking about 211 tons of Venezuelan gold. Where is it exactly?
JACK FARCHY: Well, most of it is in the U.K., in the Bank of England vault. There's also a little bit in the U.S. and in Canada.
BLOCK: And it's stored exactly how? I mean, what form does this gold take?
FARCHY: Well, it comes in 400-ounce bars, which is the standard, what's called good delivery bar, which is the standard unit of physical gold trading in the London market which is the center of the global gold market. So that 211 tons is something like 17,000 400-ounce bars.
BLOCK: OK. So, if Hugo Chavez wants to get the 17,000 bars of gold into Venezuela, how do they do that? How does it get there?
FARCHY: Well, the real challenge is one of insurance, because the issue is not so much weight. Two hundred tons is not - it's heavy but it's not huge amounts of cargo especially to move. The issue is, at today's gold price which is a new record, as it seems to be every day these days, it's worth almost $13 billion.

That is a damn large amount of gold to be hauling around.  If Chavez were smart, he'd dump it on the market and crush the price down.  Gold is pointless as an investment.