I can’t imagine it means anything cheerful that Vladimir Putin, the Russian czar, is stockpiling gold as fast as he can get his hands on it.
According to the World Gold Council, Russia has more than doubled its gold reserves in the past five years. Putin has taken advantage of the financial crisis to build the world’s fifth-biggest gold pile in a handful of years, and is buying about half a billion dollars’ worth every month.
It emerged last month that financial gurus George Soros and John Paulson had also increased their bullion exposure, but it’s Putin that’s really caught my eye.
No one else in the world plays global power politics as ruthlessly as Russia’s chilling strongman,
Showing posts with label Gold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gold. Show all posts
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Why is Putin stockpiling gold?
Because he's very smart, that's why. The dollar is going to die and Russia is not going down.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Jim Willie:Imminent Big Bank Death Spiral
http://www.kitco.com/ind/willie/oct282010.html
It's time to think real hard kids.
We have a problem that can not go on.
And everybody is talking about it, except the government, the investment banks the FED and Wall Street, and why aren't they talking about it?
Because they created it.
It's time to think real hard kids.
We have a problem that can not go on.
And everybody is talking about it, except the government, the investment banks the FED and Wall Street, and why aren't they talking about it?
Because they created it.
The mortgage & foreclosure scandal runs so deep that ordinary observers can conclude the US financial foundation is laced with a cancer detectable by ordinary people. The metastasis is visible from the distribution of mortgage bonds into the commercial paper market, money market funds, the bank balance sheets, pension funds under management, foreign central banks, and countless financial funds across the globe. Some primary features of the cancerous tissue material are allegations of mortgage bond fraud, major securities violations, absent linkage to property title, income tax evasion, forged foreclosure documents, duplicate property linkage to single mortgage bonds, NINJA (no income, no job or assets) loans to unqualified buyers, and more. In fact, more is revealed it seeems each passing week toward additional facie to high level and systemic fraud. The world is watching. The growing international reaction will be amplified demand for Gold, from impressions that the USDollar & USEconomy have RICO racketeering components extending to Wall Street banks and Fannie Mae mortgage repositories.
The centerpiece question, when allegation of the US bond fraud is coupled with European sovereign debt distress, comes down to WHAT IS MONEY? The answer is Gold & Silver and not much of anything else. Other assets like crude oil or farmland are effective hedges against tainted money, but when they contain debt tethers, they too are
The vast monetization schemes are set to come into motion for the bond market in general. The objects are hardly just USGovt debt securities, not even just Fannie Mae mortgage securities, but big bank Corporate Bonds as well. The schemes have painted the USDollar in a light with a RICO tint, as in racketeering, sanctioned by the US finance ministry and shielded from prosecution by US legal authorities and regulatory bodies. Worse still, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has permitted flagrant accounting fraud to the big dead US banks. Since April 2009, they have been permitted to declare any value they wish on their toxic balance sheets. That has enabled them to take advantage of USGovt largesse, direct USFed redemption of toxic bonds, called widely banker welfare. That has enabled them to tap the 0% money tree that produces carry trade profits. The only stipulation was the banks have been required to place their excess cash at the USFed itself, which thereby hid the central bank's insolvency, and distracted attention from the absence of Loan Loss Reserves for the banks. Details on the USFed balance sheet, and big bank vulnerability to further losses, are provided in the October Hat Trick Letter. Toss in the High Frequency Trading schemes, and the US financial markets look to contain more crooked venues than the Las Vegas casinos. The USDollar lies at great risk in the process.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Fake gold bars! What's next?
http://www.viewzone.com/fakegold.html
What question is: What hasn't been raped or pillaged in this country?
It's one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.
But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.
A recent discovery -- in October of 2009 -- has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the "big money" brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox -- the US Treasury gold -- that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an "m") of gold bars are fake!
Who did this? Apparently our own government.
Background
What question is: What hasn't been raped or pillaged in this country?
It's one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.
But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.
A recent discovery -- in October of 2009 -- has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the "big money" brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox -- the US Treasury gold -- that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an "m") of gold bars are fake!
Who did this? Apparently our own government.
Background
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Common sense by Dr. Murray Sabin
Why Gold Will Rise to at Least $6,000 per Ounce
By Dr. Murray Sabrin
May 26 2009 3:58PM
www.politickernj.com
This article was printed in a forum that I frequent along with the question if Dr. Sabin was crazy.
My answer to their question is no, and that it is the only way to stabilize our economy as well as the global economy.
In November 2003, a month before the 90th anniversary of the creation of the Federal Reserve, I spoke to a group of money managers and bond traders in south Florida about the Federal Reserve’s nine decade legacy. At that time the price of gold was approximately $380 per ounce. I informed the attendees that gold was the most undervalued asset on the planet. Nearly six years later, gold has nearly tripled in price and may have been the best performing asset class in the world since then, and one of the best investments in this decade.
Hopefully, the money managers who heard my remarks about the evolution of our monetary system took my advice for their clients’ sake and added gold to their personal portfolios as well. But then again, gold was so out of favor as an asset class by Wall Street a few years ago, it would not be surprising that the attendees ignored my advice and did not add the yellow metal to their portfolios.
With gold currently trading at $950 per ounce, where will the price of gold be six years from now? Conceivably, much higher than any current forecast. How high? Later in this essay, I will explain how returning to a “hard money” dollar and a sound banking system will require a gold price of at least $6,000 per ounce and possibly much higher
Before we hypothesize a future price of gold, it is imperative we understand the current financial crisis and the need to abolish fractional reserve banking, paper money and central banking. In other words, for the American economy—and the global economy-- to enjoy sustainable prosperity we need to inject a heavy dose of free enterprise in our money and banking systems.
This is easier said than done. The political and financial elites of America want to maintain the status quo, namely, the creation of money out-of-thin air, artificially low interest rates, and massive bailouts engineered by the FED and the U.S. Treasury.
Nevertheless, the financial meltdown of the 21st century has been well documented in two outstanding books of the past year, William Fleckenstein’s Greenspan Bubbles and Thomas Woods’ Meltdown. If you have not read them both, they should be on the top on your summer reading list. Both authors place the blame for the back-to-back bubbles, the dotcom bust and the housing collapse, squarely on the Federal Reserve’s easy money polices under Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
In a nutshell, easy money drives down interest rates, which in turn set into motion feverish activity and speculation in sector or sectors of the economy that benefit from the flow of new money from the FED. The excess credit propels prices higher for common stocks, real estate, commodities, etc. When the FED “tightens” credit to rein in the overheated economy, the inevitable correction sets in. Bankruptcies soar, unemployment rises, stock prices drop precipitously, and state and local governments face huge revenue shortfalls as income and sales tax revenues drop. In other words, the unsustainable boom appears to create a perpetual “party” in the economy, only to be exposed as a period of “false” prosperity.
The booms and busts of the past two decades are textbook examples of the financial and economic crises caused by central banking. Of all the schools of thought, only the Austrian School of Economics explains how waves of boom and bust are inevitable if central bankers try to substitute credit created out-of-thin air for genuine savings. Working in the same tradition, economist Jesus Huerta de Soto in his monumental survey of world economic history (Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles), explains how economic fluctuations are the result of bank credit expansion prior to the establishment of central banking and how business cycles have unfolded since the creation of the first central bank in England (1692).
To prevent further boom-bust cycles, the following changes in the U.S. monetary/banking system should be implemented ASAP. These would require banks to restructure along the following guidelines.
All demand deposits would be backed by 100% reserves. In other words, fractional reserve banking would be prohibited as a violation of property rights. This would eliminate the bank run, because banks would have all the money in reserves to meet depositors’ requests for cash. This reform would be potentially deflationary since the banking system would have to contract the amount of money and credit in the current inflationary system to restore 100% reserve banking.
Banks would offer time deposits from one day to 30 years or more. This would provide a pool of real savings for banks so they could perform their role as financial intermediaries without government protection and intervention.
FDIC insurance would be eliminated. Banks and depositors would operate in a free market. Savers would determine how much risk they want to incur and lend their funds to banks based on their time horizons.
Permanent bank capital—preferred and common stockholders—would be the foundation of a free enterprise banking system. Risk of default would be allocated among shareholders and savers.
The Federal Reserve would be abolished and would no longer manipulate short-term interest rates and be the lender of last resort. The FED’s track record of the past century should convince any objective observer and analyst that it has been a failure. The dollar’s purchasing power has fallen by more than 95% since the FED was created and the business cycle is still with us.
The dollar will once again be defined as a weight of gold. What should the ratio be between the supply of dollars and the 260,000,000 ounces of gold held by the Federal Reserve?
There are several ways to revalue the dollar in terms of gold and make the U.S. dollar a hard money once again. This would create a 100% gold dollar. Americans as well as foreigners are used to conducting their exchanges dollars so the goal is to regain the confidence of dollar holders by ending the devaluation of the dollar.
All currency and demand deposits and other forms of money would be convertible into gold. That would mean all forms of money that people are familiar with would “backed” by gold. Inasmuch as there about $1.6 trillion of this form of money outstanding that would be backed by about 260,000,000 million ounces of gold held by the Federal Reserve, the price of gold or more accurately the value of the dollar would be 1/6,153 of an ounce of gold. In other words, the price of gold would be $6,153 per ounce.
According the Rothbard/Salerno definition of the “True Money Supply,” the current amount of dollars in the economy that functions as the general medium of exchange is about $5.5 trillion. Based on this approach, the FED’s 260,000,000 ounces of gold would have a dollar/ratio of 1/21,153, or the price of gold would be $21,153 per ounce. Before you mortgage the house and sell the kids to make more than twenty times your money, another economist challenges the Rothbard/Salerno definition of the true money supply.
Economist Frank Shostak in his essay on the money supply, argues that savings deposits should be removed from the definition of money because they are a credit deposit rather than a demand deposit. Based on the Shostak approach, investment manager Mike Shedlock calculates M’, (M Prime), as approximately $2.2 trillion. The gold/dollar ratio would be 1/8.461 or a gold price of $8,461 per ounce under this definition of the money supply.
Clearly, no matter what definition of money is used to restore a gold backed dollar, the price of gold will have to be adjusted upward by a factor of at least six or more from today to reflect the enormous deprecation of the dollar since the FED was created nearly a hundred years ago.
The revaluation of the dollar will not happen because Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary embrace hard money principles and realize 100% reserves are necessary for the banking system to function as a reliable financial intermediary. The restoration of a gold backed dollar will occur when dollar holders lose confidence in the purchasing power of the greenback. The sooner the next great money and banking reforms are implemented, the less chance there will be for a global monetary debacle, given the trillions of dollars the FED and other central banks have created in the past six months. In the meantime, load up on the yellow metal. It is your best insurance policy against Obama, Congress, Bernanke, and Geithner.
Dr. Murray Sabrin
By Dr. Murray Sabrin
May 26 2009 3:58PM
www.politickernj.com
This article was printed in a forum that I frequent along with the question if Dr. Sabin was crazy.
My answer to their question is no, and that it is the only way to stabilize our economy as well as the global economy.
In November 2003, a month before the 90th anniversary of the creation of the Federal Reserve, I spoke to a group of money managers and bond traders in south Florida about the Federal Reserve’s nine decade legacy. At that time the price of gold was approximately $380 per ounce. I informed the attendees that gold was the most undervalued asset on the planet. Nearly six years later, gold has nearly tripled in price and may have been the best performing asset class in the world since then, and one of the best investments in this decade.
Hopefully, the money managers who heard my remarks about the evolution of our monetary system took my advice for their clients’ sake and added gold to their personal portfolios as well. But then again, gold was so out of favor as an asset class by Wall Street a few years ago, it would not be surprising that the attendees ignored my advice and did not add the yellow metal to their portfolios.
With gold currently trading at $950 per ounce, where will the price of gold be six years from now? Conceivably, much higher than any current forecast. How high? Later in this essay, I will explain how returning to a “hard money” dollar and a sound banking system will require a gold price of at least $6,000 per ounce and possibly much higher
Before we hypothesize a future price of gold, it is imperative we understand the current financial crisis and the need to abolish fractional reserve banking, paper money and central banking. In other words, for the American economy—and the global economy-- to enjoy sustainable prosperity we need to inject a heavy dose of free enterprise in our money and banking systems.
This is easier said than done. The political and financial elites of America want to maintain the status quo, namely, the creation of money out-of-thin air, artificially low interest rates, and massive bailouts engineered by the FED and the U.S. Treasury.
Nevertheless, the financial meltdown of the 21st century has been well documented in two outstanding books of the past year, William Fleckenstein’s Greenspan Bubbles and Thomas Woods’ Meltdown. If you have not read them both, they should be on the top on your summer reading list. Both authors place the blame for the back-to-back bubbles, the dotcom bust and the housing collapse, squarely on the Federal Reserve’s easy money polices under Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
In a nutshell, easy money drives down interest rates, which in turn set into motion feverish activity and speculation in sector or sectors of the economy that benefit from the flow of new money from the FED. The excess credit propels prices higher for common stocks, real estate, commodities, etc. When the FED “tightens” credit to rein in the overheated economy, the inevitable correction sets in. Bankruptcies soar, unemployment rises, stock prices drop precipitously, and state and local governments face huge revenue shortfalls as income and sales tax revenues drop. In other words, the unsustainable boom appears to create a perpetual “party” in the economy, only to be exposed as a period of “false” prosperity.
The booms and busts of the past two decades are textbook examples of the financial and economic crises caused by central banking. Of all the schools of thought, only the Austrian School of Economics explains how waves of boom and bust are inevitable if central bankers try to substitute credit created out-of-thin air for genuine savings. Working in the same tradition, economist Jesus Huerta de Soto in his monumental survey of world economic history (Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles), explains how economic fluctuations are the result of bank credit expansion prior to the establishment of central banking and how business cycles have unfolded since the creation of the first central bank in England (1692).
To prevent further boom-bust cycles, the following changes in the U.S. monetary/banking system should be implemented ASAP. These would require banks to restructure along the following guidelines.
All demand deposits would be backed by 100% reserves. In other words, fractional reserve banking would be prohibited as a violation of property rights. This would eliminate the bank run, because banks would have all the money in reserves to meet depositors’ requests for cash. This reform would be potentially deflationary since the banking system would have to contract the amount of money and credit in the current inflationary system to restore 100% reserve banking.
Banks would offer time deposits from one day to 30 years or more. This would provide a pool of real savings for banks so they could perform their role as financial intermediaries without government protection and intervention.
FDIC insurance would be eliminated. Banks and depositors would operate in a free market. Savers would determine how much risk they want to incur and lend their funds to banks based on their time horizons.
Permanent bank capital—preferred and common stockholders—would be the foundation of a free enterprise banking system. Risk of default would be allocated among shareholders and savers.
The Federal Reserve would be abolished and would no longer manipulate short-term interest rates and be the lender of last resort. The FED’s track record of the past century should convince any objective observer and analyst that it has been a failure. The dollar’s purchasing power has fallen by more than 95% since the FED was created and the business cycle is still with us.
The dollar will once again be defined as a weight of gold. What should the ratio be between the supply of dollars and the 260,000,000 ounces of gold held by the Federal Reserve?
There are several ways to revalue the dollar in terms of gold and make the U.S. dollar a hard money once again. This would create a 100% gold dollar. Americans as well as foreigners are used to conducting their exchanges dollars so the goal is to regain the confidence of dollar holders by ending the devaluation of the dollar.
All currency and demand deposits and other forms of money would be convertible into gold. That would mean all forms of money that people are familiar with would “backed” by gold. Inasmuch as there about $1.6 trillion of this form of money outstanding that would be backed by about 260,000,000 million ounces of gold held by the Federal Reserve, the price of gold or more accurately the value of the dollar would be 1/6,153 of an ounce of gold. In other words, the price of gold would be $6,153 per ounce.
According the Rothbard/Salerno definition of the “True Money Supply,” the current amount of dollars in the economy that functions as the general medium of exchange is about $5.5 trillion. Based on this approach, the FED’s 260,000,000 ounces of gold would have a dollar/ratio of 1/21,153, or the price of gold would be $21,153 per ounce. Before you mortgage the house and sell the kids to make more than twenty times your money, another economist challenges the Rothbard/Salerno definition of the true money supply.
Economist Frank Shostak in his essay on the money supply, argues that savings deposits should be removed from the definition of money because they are a credit deposit rather than a demand deposit. Based on the Shostak approach, investment manager Mike Shedlock calculates M’, (M Prime), as approximately $2.2 trillion. The gold/dollar ratio would be 1/8.461 or a gold price of $8,461 per ounce under this definition of the money supply.
Clearly, no matter what definition of money is used to restore a gold backed dollar, the price of gold will have to be adjusted upward by a factor of at least six or more from today to reflect the enormous deprecation of the dollar since the FED was created nearly a hundred years ago.
The revaluation of the dollar will not happen because Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary embrace hard money principles and realize 100% reserves are necessary for the banking system to function as a reliable financial intermediary. The restoration of a gold backed dollar will occur when dollar holders lose confidence in the purchasing power of the greenback. The sooner the next great money and banking reforms are implemented, the less chance there will be for a global monetary debacle, given the trillions of dollars the FED and other central banks have created in the past six months. In the meantime, load up on the yellow metal. It is your best insurance policy against Obama, Congress, Bernanke, and Geithner.
Dr. Murray Sabrin
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
German firm plans 'Gold-to-Go' ATMs to sell tiny, pricey gold bars
http://www.financialpost.com/personal-finance/story.html?id=1610606
Opportunities come in all sizes I'd say
A German asset management company plans to set up 500 "Gold-to-Go" ATMs in Germany, Switzerland and Austria this year. A gold-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) was on display at Frankfurt's main railway station for a one-day marketing test yesterday. A one-gram piece of gold, the size of a child's little fingernail and about as thin, cost US$42.25--a 30% premium to the spot market price. The flat rectangular piece came out of the cash-only ATM in a tin box, including a certificate of authenticity. "This is more than a marketing gimmick," said Thomas Geissler, chief executive of TG-Gold-Super-Markt.de, the company planning to set up the 500 gold ATMs at a cost of ¤20,000 ($31,500) apiece. "It is an appetizer for a strategic investment in precious metals. Gold is an asset everyone should have, between 5% and 15% of your liquid assets in physical gold," he said.
Close
Presented by
Opportunities come in all sizes I'd say
A German asset management company plans to set up 500 "Gold-to-Go" ATMs in Germany, Switzerland and Austria this year. A gold-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) was on display at Frankfurt's main railway station for a one-day marketing test yesterday. A one-gram piece of gold, the size of a child's little fingernail and about as thin, cost US$42.25--a 30% premium to the spot market price. The flat rectangular piece came out of the cash-only ATM in a tin box, including a certificate of authenticity. "This is more than a marketing gimmick," said Thomas Geissler, chief executive of TG-Gold-Super-Markt.de, the company planning to set up the 500 gold ATMs at a cost of ¤20,000 ($31,500) apiece. "It is an appetizer for a strategic investment in precious metals. Gold is an asset everyone should have, between 5% and 15% of your liquid assets in physical gold," he said.
Close
Presented by
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)