TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has withdrawn around $75 billion from Europe to prevent the assets from being blocked under threatened new sanctions over Tehran's disputed nuclear ambitions, an Iranian weekly said.

Western powers are warning the Islamic Republic of more punitive measures if it rejects an incentives offer and presses on with sensitive nuclear work, but the world's fourth-largest oil exporter is showing no sign of backing down.

"Part of Iran's assets in European banks have been converted to gold and shares and another part has been transferred to Asian banks," Mohsen Talaie, deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, was quoted as saying.

Uncle Sam was in hock to the New York gang to the tune of well over one-half trillion dollars, and every week he had to borrow at least an additional billion to stay in business.

The problem was that the banks were starting to run out of money! And "they" had concluded that this problem could only be alleviated in one of two ways. The easiest would have been simply to print money. But that would have led to runaway inflation, which in turn would most likely have also led to the demise of the system.

The vastly superior solution was to tap a new source of savings - massively and quickly. And such a source existed in the Middle East, where the oil nations had accumulated a hoard of savings that was absolutely unique in the history of mankind - over half a trillion dollars, an amount almost equal to the value of all the shares of all the corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange. This represented the wealth that had taken the United States two centuries to build up; the Arabs had taken less than a decade. Salvation for Wall Street could be found in Riyadh - and perhaps only in Riyadh.

Sindona was convicted in the U.S. on 65 counts of fraud and in 1984 was extradited to Italy where he was sentenced to life for murder. Two years later he was poisoned in his cell. Roberto Calvi also came to an untimely end. He was convicted by an Italian court in 1981 of illegal currency transactions. In 1982, a year after being convicted by an Italian court of illegal currency transactions, he was found hanging from a London bridge, possibly murdered. $400 million is still missing. These scandals were described in Power on Earth by Nick Tosches, St.Peter's Banker by Luigi DiFonzo, God's Banker by Rupert Cornwell, and The Calvi Affair by Larry Gurwin, and The Moneychangers : how the Vatican Bank enabled Roberto Calvi to steal $250 million for the Heads of the P2 Masonic lodge by Charles Raw.