Free Republic

British forces should buy off potential Taleban recruits with “bags of gold”, according to a new army field manual published yesterday. Army commanders should also talk to insurgent leaders with “blood on their hands” in order to hasten the end of the conflict in Afghanistan. The edicts, which are contained in rewritten counter-insurgency guidelines, will be taught to all new army officers. They mark a strategic rethink after three years in which British and Nato forces have failed to defeat the Taleban. The manual is also a recognition that the Army’s previous doctrine for success against insurgents, which was based...

Five days after he took delivery of a metal detector and seven steps into his first treasure hunt, a novice archaeologist has helped to rewrite Scottish history and may be a millionaire after he unearthed four 2,300-year-old torcs made of pure gold a few feet from his parked car. David Booth, a game warden at Blair Drummond Safari Park, in Stirlingshire, bought his £240 detector from a website that claimed “treasure need not be an idle dream”. What then seemed an absurd sales puff has proved strangely prophetic. The hoard he discovered at the edge of a field was described...

Image: via Food Court LunchAmong the chaos of the collapse of Hitler’s empire in April 1945 the biggest heist in history took place. Gold bars, jewels and stolen foreign currency with an estimated worth of $3.34 billion vanished from the Reichsbank vaults, in Germany.Reichsbank, Berlin 1933Image: German Federal Archive In the ensuing decades small quantities of this bounty have turned up in Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Sweden but the majority remains missing. Across the world search teams look for this missing treasure and the supreme prize of the legendary Amber Room, an acquisition from St. Petersburg during WWII,...

With the prospect of higher unemployment hanging over the markets, some experts expect a correction. So are they right? Michael Cuggino, president and portfolio manager at Permanent Portfolio Funds, and John Lekas, CEO and portfolio manager at Leader Capital, shared their insights. (See their recommendations, below.) “I think we go below the double dip,” Lekas told CNBC. “By year-end, we drop below 6,300 on the Dow and by 2011, we’re at 4,200.” Lekas said although Monday's ISM services index was “neutral,” the unemployment number was at 785,000 last month and that number is expected to worsen. “So 26 to 27...

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire. Experts said the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date back to the 7th Century, was unparalleled in size. It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown. Terry Herbert, who found it on farmland using a metal detector, said it "was what metal detectorists dream of". It may take more than a year for it to be valued. The collection contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far...

13 gold coins have been found, wrapped together, by the river in Córdoba If you know where to look, buried treasure can still be found in Spain. The latest find was not however thanks to a map marked with an ‘X’, but came as part of an archaeological excavation as part of new drainage works in Córdoba, close to the famous Roman Bridge in the city centre. 13 gold coins, escudos, from the reign of Carlos III, dated from 1776 to 1801, and wrapped in a cloth, were found under a layer of limestone which has kept them in a...

Roy Langbord had guessed that someone in his family might have hidden away a great treasure decades before, but not until his mother had him check a long-neglected safe-deposit box did he realize just how great it was. Inside the box, opened in 2003, he found an incredibly rare coin, wrapped in a delicate paper sleeve. It was a gold $20 piece with Lady Liberty on one side, a bald eagle flying across the other and, at Liberty’s left, the four digits that made it so valuable: 1933. The famous “double eagles” from that year were never officially released by...

An external audit of the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM) has failed to find millions of dollars' worth of "missing" gold. Auditors Deloitte were asked in May to investigate a discrepancy between the amount of precious metals on the mint's inventory and in its actual stockpile. Deloitte concluded that the unaccounted for difference "does not appear to be an accounting error" and identified security as an area for consideration. The RCM said it was not yet clear whether any gold was actually missing. "All customer holdings and metal deposits entrusted with the Royal Canadian Mint are secure and have been fully...

After seven years of combing fields and beaches with a metal detector, the only thing housewife Mary Hannaby had to show for her hobby was an old dental plate. But all those efforts paid off when her first proper find turned out to be a 15th-century gold treasure valued at £250,000 or more. The find is thought to be part of a high-quality reliquary or pendant, and depicts the Holy Trinity. Mrs Hannaby, 57, from Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, heard her metal detector's tell-tale beep while out on one of her regular six-hour Sunday detecting walks with her son, woodcarver Michael,...

MORE than a thousand years ago a Saxon thief, desperate to hide his plunder, stashed a hoard of stolen gold in what is today a nondescript West Yorkshire field. What became of the thief is lost to the ages and his precious loot lay safely buried in that same field for the next millennium. There it remained until a treasure hunter, out with his trusty metal detector last year, experienced the moment he will never forget when he unearthed the amazing find on the farmland near Leeds. Archaeological experts say they believe the three gold rings, half a gold ingot...

After seven years spent prospecting for gold as a hobby in the California desert, Terry Hughes of Moorpark hit the mother lode. On Memorial Day, the former Marine and disabled Vietnam veteran scored a “one-in-a-million” find: an 8.7-ounce gold nugget worth an estimated $10,000. “We’re all hoping to find the big one and Terry did,” said Patrick Keene, co-owner of Keene Engineering, reportedly one of the world’s largest suppliers of portable mining equipment. A nugget that big — about the size of an egg — is “extremely rare,” Keene said. Hughes purchased all his mining equipment from the Chatsworth company,...

A long-time employee of a major Queens jewelry manufacturer walked off with a staggering $12 million worth of gold over the course of six years, prosecutors said. Teresa Tambunting, 50, of Scarsdale, had been secreting the gold hoard out of the Long Island City vault piece by piece by stashing small items in the lining of her pocketbook, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said. "The defendant is accused of establishing a virtual mining operation in Long Island City which siphoned off millions of dollars' worth of the precious metal," he said.

In the first Great Depression, the government tried, for several years, between 1929 and 1933, to maintain a fiction that the U.S. dollar was still convertible and as “good as gold”, in spite of having irresponsibly printed more dollars than they had gold to back them. Back in the 1920s, just like during the last 22 years, the Federal Reserve had run its printing press overtime, and, as a result, it couldn’t deliver. The U.S. Treasury eventually ran out of the gold, in the face of overwhelming public demand, resulting in the infamous gold confiscation order, by President Franklin Roosevelt,...

Russia has become the first major country to call for a partial restoration of the Gold Standard to uphold discipline in the world financial system. Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin's chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund. Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a...

... For several prominent investors and at least one senior US congressman it is not the security of the facility in Kentucky that is a cause of concern: it is the matter of how much gold remains stored there - and who owns it. They are worried that no independent auditors appear to have had access to the reported $137 billion (£96 billion) stockpile of brick-shaped gold bars in Fort Knox since the era of President Eisenhower. After the risky trading activities at supposedly safe institutions such as AIG they want to be reassured that the gold reserves are still...

Sorry, not taking Wikipedia as a source. Nor are spurious "conspiracy theory" comments welcomed. It's an honest question. Answers should cite primary sources and such primary sources should cite date and type of audit. I also expand this question to include all US stores, where the gold is owned by the US. Answers must distinguish between "holding" and "ownership", the question is to ownership! I note that a great failing of our times is that people do not know how to keep books anymore, and even less how to audit. Too many make assumptions, or give a cheap pass to...

It is said to be the most impregnable vault on Earth: built out of granite, sealed behind a 22-tonne door, located on a US military base and watched over day and night by army units with tanks, heavy artillery and Apache helicopter gunships at their disposal. Since its construction in 1937 the treasures locked inside Fort Knox have included the US Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, three volumes of the Gutenberg Bible and Magna Carta. For several prominent investors and at least one senior US congressman it is not the security of the facility in Kentucky that is a...

Whatever you do, gold and silver investors; don't ever forget how they claimed gold and silver were mere trinkets, not worthy of consideration as backing for money. Keep this one point firmly etched front and center for all to see. Never let it go out of sight for even one moment. For if the politicians, the bankers, the Treasury officials, various spokesmen for the Fed, or the money powers ever go back on that claim, you will have all the proof you will ever need that their claim was nothing but a longstanding hoax perpetrated to rob blind the uninformed...

Pension trustees and insurance company portfolio managers look away now. Your increased commitment to government bond holdings in recent times is about to blow up spectacularly. At least, that is the view of Ron Paul, the US congressman who ran against John McCain in last year’s Republican Party presidential nomination. His is a minority view. Yields on government bonds worldwide have been falling fast over the past few months and in the UK, the commencement of “quantitative easing” this month sent bond prices soaring. But the credibility of both western governments and their currencies is waning, and has been ever...

If a bill under review by the Georgia House becomes law, state residents might be paying 2010 taxes in gold. Now assigned to the House of Representatives’ Banks & Banking committee, HB 430, or the Constitutional Tender Act, would require the use of gold and silver coin for the repayment of debts to the state, notably all state taxes. It would also mandate that any bank conducting business with the state accept gold and silver coins as deposits. In effect, the bill seeks to revive the gold and silver standards for certain forms of state business, and Georgia would become...

The American economy has gone away. It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried 6 feet under.

Little-Known Trigger Predicts Huge Rally Ahead And so it happened. With CNBC's Rick Santelli doing his best to start a riot on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the threshold. It now sits at its lowest point in six years. Lower than the last bear market. We could get the chart guys out and debate where the next level of resistance lies, but it's pretty clear to the average American that this thing seems like it's far from over. But amidst the hubbub...amidst the talk of bank nationalization, stimulus, good banks and bad...

Juggling glasses of white wine and baggies filled with baubles, dozens of women descended on a well-appointed Orange County home this week to trade in their old golden treasures for hefty checks. There were earrings from ex-boyfriends, ring settings with missing stones and chain bracelets from sorority sisters. One woman brought in her husband's wedding ring -- from a previous marriage. Julia Geivet, 39, had hopes of selling an "embarrassing" Italian horn bauble she had owned since eighth grade and a few other small trinkets, which she thought might get her $30. "I figured I'd come get a little money...

Gold is exhibiting all the classic signs of being in a structural bull market. On fears of inflation in early 2008, it rallied. Then, on fears of deflation in late 2008, it rallied again. So does gold perform better during inflation or deflation? In our view, that question is the wrong starting point. On the contrary, the rationale for owning gold, as it once again approaches the $1,000 an ounce level, is the prospect of mounting monetary disorder. The US Federal Reserve, having flooded the market with liquidity by more than doubling its balance sheet in less than six months,...

Cash4Gold, best known for its cheesy, ubiquitous TV ads asking people to mail in their baubles for cash, is leaving the ranks of late-night advertisers behind and joining the big leagues. The direct marketer, whose business is one of the few to benefit from the economic downturn, has bought a 30-second spot near the end of the third quarter of the Super Bowl. Cash4Gold believes it's the first time a direct marketer - so-called because their ads incite people to pick up the phone and order the product - has jumped into the big game. While the Super Bowl is...

Sealed off by grey concrete walls and barbed wire, the workmen in protective glasses and steel-toed boots at this smelter cannot work fast enough to meet demand from the nervous rich for gold. This refinery near Lake Lugano in the Alps is running day and night as people worried about recession rush to switch their assets into something that may hold its value. "I have been in the gold business for 30 years and I have never experienced anything like this," said Bernhard Schnellmann, director for precious metal services at the refiner Argor-Heraeus, one of the world's three largest. "Production...

From "Midas" Commentary by Bill Murphy LeMetropoleCafe.com Friday, December 12, 2008 I received a call this morning from a commodities broker who told me that the Comex is alerting various futures firms about the potential of a squeeze on the December contract and is advising the $840 December shorts to exit their positions. That is the remaining open position. There have been 12,636 notices of delivery. The shorts have until December 31 to make delivery. Normally they deliver early to take in cash and earn the interest. They must be delaying. As I understand the situation, that represents about 40...

Investors in gold are demanding “unprecedented” amounts of bullion bars and coins and moving them into their own vaults as fears about the health of the global financial system deepen. Industry executives and bankers at the London Bullion Market Association annual meeting said the extent of the move into physical gold was unseen and driven by the very rich. “There is an enormous pick-up in investment demand. I have never seen a market like this in my 33-year career,” said Jeremy Charles, chairman of the LBMA. “The gold refineries cannot produce enough bars.” The move comes as fears grow among...

A rumor is swirling around the Internet that an inglorious end to the U.S. economy is imminent. Unlike previous rumors to this effect, this one carries the weight of recent events in the financial realm and has many believing the rumor will come to pass. Let's examine some of the claims being made: On March 18, 2008, a "closed door" session of Congress was held for only the fourth time in history. According to House Rule XVII, clause 9, it is forbidden for members of the U.S. House of Representatives to reveal the discussions held behind those doors. The penalty...

Authorities have seized $60,000 cash, some of it sealed in shrink wrap, and $3 million in gold bullion at the house of James Fayed, whose wife, Pamela, was murdered last week. Twenty-five assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition were also seized from the house...Fayed was arrested Friday evening on charges relating to his business...police have determined that the vehicle used by the murderer in the slaying of Pamela Fayed was rented with a credit card bearing the name of her estranged husband...

Probably almost everyone is familiar with the hyperinflationary episode that engulfed Germany after the First World War. That nation’s economy was crippled by monetary problems that resulted in dreadful personal hardships, even though up to that time Germany had achieved one of the highest living standards in the world. The newly formed German government, named for the city where their constitution was drafted after the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918, kept pumping up the money supply. The process started relatively slowly, but quickly the pace of money creation accelerated. The Weimar government was paying its bills on credit – just like...

No substance of value has held its allure longer than gold. It is found in prehistoric burial sites, in jewelry designs the world over and in modern-day electronic circuitry. Gold can also be found in recent investment reports noting that it topped out at more than $1,000 an ounce in mid-March, up from about $680 a year ago. Although it dipped to just under $900 late in April, it has had a tremendous run, up from $350 five years ago. What has driven these price gains? What does gold tell us about the economy's future? Should ordinary investors buy it?...

WASHINGTON - The International Monetary Fund's executive board has approved a broad financial overhaul plan that could lead to the eventual sale of a little over 400 tons of its substantial gold supplies. The sale cannot occur without congressional approval as well as legislative action in many of the 184 other nations that are members of the Washington-based lending institution. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn welcomed the board's decision Monday to propose a new framework for the fund, designed to close a projected $400 million budget deficit over the next few years. It is "a landmark agreement that will put...

Frank Holmes, chief executive officer at U.S. Global Investors, says that gold will hit $2,000 an ounce and that while the move won't be straight there from current levels investors should not be surprised by it. Holmes noted that virtually all commodities have gone through their "inflation-adjusted 1980 price levels," with the notable exception of gold, and that to get to that range the price of gold would have to top $2,000 an ounce. Holmes said he expects a short-term pull-back in gold -- based on a correction he sees coming in oil and a short rally in the dollar,...

So might US investors want to switch out of gold bullion ahead of Easter this year and move into the single currency instead? After all, the Euro still pays 4.0% interest per year – a feat that dumb gold could never promise or achieve – and with Eurozone inflation holding at a record 3.2% year-on-year in February, the European Central Bank (ECB) is clearly in no mood to start slashing rates now. "Inflation will not slow as markedly as supposed," warned the ECB's Axel Weber last week. Colleague Juergen Stark added that he was "highly dissatisfied" with the current surge...

On this Valentine's day, let us remember and pay a tribute to all people who love the Government, and while we are at it, let's pay tribute to the Government itself by buying a T-Bill ! Thank goodness most of America and the rest of the world still loves the Federal Government of the United States and the Federal Reserve enough to continue to hold about $30 trillion worth of bonds that are paying, on average, about 5% while inflation is about 17%. Such Fed-loving bond holders clearly approve of all the spending habits of the United States government, by...

Federal agencies have indicated that the accumulated trade debts of the United States have reached $9 trillion.  This can be explained once one realizes that outsourcing of production jobs and manufacturing has gathered speed over the last twenty years to a point where we don’t make more than a nominal percentage of our own necessities.  These debts result in accumulated “TRADE DEFICITS” which are discussed in the daily papers.  What is not discussed, however, is how these “trade debts” will ever be paid.  Well, common sense would tell most of us that — they will be paid in some form....

A lot of readers have asked why I duck the issue of gold when talking about the dollar crisis and the M3 monetary blow-off. So here we go: I started buying gold mining shares in September 2001, missing the bottom by four months. I still hold some shares (mostly duds, since I am the village idiot when it comes to picking stocks). Gold’s 15 to 20 year upward cycle is alive and well. For those who don’t follow bullion, gold hit $252 an ounce in the Spring of 2001 in a final capitulation sell-off when Gordon Brown began his Treasury...

Can someone tell me why so many are excited about the Dow hitting 13,000? In suppose it's better than having it hit "0" but, given the decades long destruction of the value of U.S. "money," the thing SHOULD be up over 50,000 or more. For anyone who shives a git, here's why I say that. (I wrote this a number of years ago when things were NOT going well with the economy. Trust me: They WILL get ugly once again as man -- or certain men -- cannot resist playing God. We continue to violate the universal, immutable laws of...

The late Nobel Economic laureate Milton Friedman once remarked, “Money is too important to be left to central bankers. You essentially have a group of unelected people who have enormous power to affect the economy. I’ve always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a laptop computer, to calculate the monetary base and expand it annually, through war, peace, feast and famine by, perhaps, a predictable 2 percent,” Friedman said.

Searching for a pot of gold? Try the center of the Earth. More than 99 percent of Earth's gold is missing—it all sank to the center of the planet billions of years ago. In fact, says geologist Bernard Wood of Macquarie University in Australia, there's enough gold in Earth's core to coat its surface in 1.5 feet of the stuff. How did it get there? Earth formed from a series of smaller planetesimals that crashed together over the course of 30 million to 40 million years. Wood deduced how much gold ought to be present in Earth's crust by comparing...

AP Report: Chinese Gold Consumption to Grow Tuesday December 5, 2006 Report: Chinese Gold Consumption to Grow 17 Percent This Year to Record 350 Tons SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China will consume a record 350 tons of gold this year amid surging sales of gold bullion, up 17 percent from 2005, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday. Gold output in China is likely to top 240 tons this year, with industry profits exceeding 5.5 billion yuan (US$700 million; euro526 million), the report said, citing the chairman of the China Gold Association, Cheng Fumin. China is the world's third-biggest consumer...

Dollar woes poised to carry over into next year Greenback is down about 50% vs. euro in past five years; down 6% vs. yen By Wanfeng Zhou, MarketWatch Nov 28, 2006 NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- After a precipitous slide in the last week that caught many traders off guard, the dollar is vulnerable to further losses and may continue to weaken against major rivals heading into 2007, analysts said Tuesday. "Sentiment for the dollar has been deteriorating steadily over recent weeks," said Mitul Kotecha, head of global foreign-exchange strategy at French investment bank Calyon. The decline was not prompted by...

Blah, blah, blah. Story about how pork queen pelosi got the gubmint to issue a commemorative coin honoring the old San Francisco mint. Pelosi and Feinstein each struck one of the coins. Sales of the coins = more pork to turn the mint into a museum. Anyway, here are the pics:

This week it was announced that both producer and consumer prices dropped by 1.3% and .5% respectively, while housing starts unexpectedly increased by 5.9%. Not surprisingly, Wall Street celebrated the apparent good news, sending the Dow Industrials into uncharted territory. As has been its recent tendency, the market is unconcerned with recent bad news, instead championing it as confirming the highly touted “soft-landing.” September’s much weaker than expected non-farm payroll data and the Philadelphia Fed survey that showed an unexpected deterioration in manufacturing, are two recent examples. However, a closer look at the supposed good news reveals just how unwarranted...

(CBS) IRVINE The unsold inventory of new homes in Orange County is at the highest level since 1996, according to an economic forecast released Friday in Irvine. Through August, sales of existing homes in Orange County were off 29 percent compared to the same period a year ago, the largest year-over-year decline, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast: Orange County Economic Outlook for 2007. The rate of sales over the last five months have been "brutally low," with Southern California home sales falling to their lowest level in nine years last month, according to the forecast.

The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history. Prepare for the economic pain when it pops NEVER before have real house prices risen so fast, for so long, in so many countries. Property markets have been frothing from America, Britain and Australia to France, Spain and China. Rising property prices helped to prop up the world economy after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. What if the housing boom now turns to bust? According to estimates by The Economist, the total value of residential property in developed economies rose by more than $30 trillion over the...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Gold and silver futures fell Friday to their lowest levels since June as the U.S. dollar rose to a seven-week high against the euro. The dollar rose against the euro, but traded little changed against the yen early Friday, recovering from losses suffered in the prior session in reaction to strong eurozone economic news. The U.S. currency briefly lost strength after a government report showed consumer price inflation moderated in August as gasoline and home ownership costs rose at a slower pace. See full story. "Gold should now look to test towards the June low around...

LONDON (AP) -- The U.S. dollar was mixed against other major currencies in late European trading Monday. Gold fell sharply. Analysts said gold prices declined following a report that Iran was considering complying -- at least temporarily -- with the U.N. Security Council's demand that it suspend its uranium enrichment program. The euro bought US$1.2685, up from US$1.2676 late Friday. Other dollar rates: --117.77 Japanese yen, up from 116.87 --1.2459 Swiss francs, down from 1.2468 --1.1212 Canadian dollars, up from 1.1204 The British pound traded at US$1.8617, down from US$1.8649. Gold closed in London at US$585.30, down from US$609.00 late...

When Ben Bernanke told Congress that moderating economic growth will likely contain inflationary pressures, Wall Street responded with its biggest one-day rally in nearly two years. Unfortunately for the Wall Street party boys, the Fed Chairman is likely wrong on both counts. In the first place the U.S. economy will not merely slow, but tumble, in the coming months/years, and rather than quelling inflation’s fire, the inevitable recession will actually stoke its flames. Bernanke’s faulty logic assumes that inflation is somehow a by-product of economic growth. However, real economic growth emanates from increased productivity, which tends to hold prices down....