Free Republic

The Daily Ticker's Lauren Lyster conducted an interesting interview today with British Member of Parliament Kwasi Kwarteng on gold and balancing the budget. To play the video, click on the preceding link. Kwarteng is author of War and Gold, a Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt. Kwarteng notes the historic stability under gold standards, specifically citing the 2008 financial crisis and national debt level as problems related to the Fed and printing paper money. "The credit crunch, the credit bubble that preceded it, and the huge amounts of debt and deficits that we have are related to paper money,"...

Rob Kirby is an expert on forensic macroeconomics. His research shows central bankers are starting to not trust each other. “Countries around the world with foreign reserve accounts where they hold vast amounts of U.S. dollars, all it’s going to take is for one of them to get really spooked . . . and bolting for the door ... What about America’s gold? Is it still in Fort Knox? Kirby says, “I don’t believe America possesses any substantial amount of gold. America claims to have sovereign holdings of just over 8,000 metric tons. I believe that number is grossly inflated,...

A couple of readers asked me to comment on the news Regulator Fines Barclays Over the Pricing of Gold. A British financial regulator has fined Barclays $43.9 million after accusing a former trader at the bank of improperly influencing gold prices at the expense of a customer. The F.C.A. also fined the former Barclays trader, Daniel James Plunkett, £95,600 and barred him from participating in any regulated financial activity. The authority said Mr. Plunkett, who settled with it, had profited at the expense of a customer, who was later fully compensated by Barclays. Mr. Plunkett’s improper conduct occurred on June...

Ask Alan Lane. In October, the president and CEO of Silvergate Bank in La Jolla, Calif., was up in Sacramento for a roundtable convened by the California Bankers Association and the state's Department of Business Oversight. Reading a laundry list of about a dozen issues on the department's radar, Commissioner Jan Lynn Owen mentioned Bitcoin — the Internet currency, payment system and technology that's been grabbing headlines, igniting controversy and inspiring innovation across the globe. Lane pricked up his ears, in part because the $616 million-asset Silvergate had been in discussions about banking a Bitcoin startup.

So, with another “plunge” in the economy coming, how’s the dollar going to hold up? Williams explains, “You are not seeing an annual deficit of $400 or $500 billion dollars. You are really seeing something close to $6 trillion. That is beyond control, and it raises the question of long term solvency of the U.S. It is a big concern for the global markets. It’s really the reason why nobody outside the United States wants to hold the dollar. Now, look at the U.S. economy, it is turning down. Economic strength is a big factor in the value of a...

Gold is falling after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave an upbeat assessment of the U.S. economy and said that inflation remains low. […] Yellen’s comments suggest that the Federal Reserve is set to continue reducing its economic stimulus, lessening the threat of rising prices. Investors typically buy gold as a hedge against inflation. …

Financial newsletter writer, Dr. Jim Willie, thinks the Ukraine crisis is more of a financial war than a shooting war. Dr. Willie says, “A couple of months ago, I said, ‘Give it time and the whole nation would sink,’ and the Putin strategy would be to create a standoff militarily, maybe some skirmishes, but let the nation sink. It’s been raided of its gold and raided of its official government funds; and, now, the energy companies are in there doing fracking. I think what is happening now is we are starting to see the breakdown.” Dr. Willie, who holds a...

We can't ignore it anymore - the markets are rigged. The LIBOR scandal broke almost two years ago, and the banks found responsible for manipulating that key index are still dealing with lawsuits. Meanwhile, allegations of gold market manipulation have been simmering for over a decade and grew into an inferno after the spot price dropped dramatically last spring. Yet I'm left wondering what the conspiracy theorists hope to accomplish. Yes, I believe in exposing truth for its own sake and that the individual investor should have the same opportunities in the marketplace as the big institutions. But with these...

Dutch archaeologists have recently completed the rescue excavation of a unique treasure hoard dating to the beginning of the 5th century AD, from a field in Limburg... According to the Byzantine historian Zosimus, Constantine III tried to re-secure the entire Roman Rhine frontier against Germanic invaders... The historians Orosius and Zosimus tells us that Constantine III solved the problem of the invading Germanic groups by liberal use of the money bag along with developing close alliances to Germanic warlords on both sides of the Rhine... The Echt hoard would therefore have belonged to a Germanic officer in Roman service –...

You don't have to be on crack to believe the dollar isn't spiraling toward worthlessness but it would probably help if embracing that delusion were to be your goal. (Video-selfie)

A well-known Saudi Islamic scholar has issued a fatwa (religious edict) prohibiting men from using a gold-plated mobile phone. Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al Fowzan, a jurisprudence professor and member of the Saudi human rights commission, said women can use such handsets. “As for men, they are prohibited from using gold or gold-plated mobile handsets…such handsets are allowed for women but not men,” he said on his Twitter page in response to a query from a reader. Saudi newspapers said Fowzan’s fatwa came as thousands of men in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states started to opt for gold-plated mobile phones.

It's the size of a golf ball, but a lot more valuable: Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Lujan Neutron Scattering Center have verified that a heavy piece of gold, found years ago in Venezuela, is, in fact, a single crystal of the valuable element — and it's worth an estimated $1.5 million. The lump of gold, which weighs 217.78 grams (about 7.7 ounces), was brought to Los Alamos to confirm whether it was a single crystal of gold, or a more common multiple-crystal structure. "The structure or atomic arrangement of gold crystals of this size has never been studied...

Gold Is Having Its Worst Day Since The Day Of The Taper Joe WeisenthalApril 15, 2014, 8:30 AMGold is getting smoked today. Worst day since December, when the taper was first announced.

Friday, April 11, 2014 The Truth About Buying Gold And Silver Every day, the radio airways and cable news broadcasts are filled with advertising from "gold bug" companies who are trying to convince you to buy both gold and silver. There are dozens of them: Goldline, Lear Capital, Rosland, Merit, and so on. All of whom claim that, by holding these precious metals, you are being protected against inflation as a result of massive government spending and the devaluation of the dollar, or, protected against another recession, depression, or stock market crash. The problem is that all of those claims...

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

A new method of capturing detailed, three-dimensional images of minute samples of material under extreme pressures is shedding light on the evolution of the Earth's interior. Early results suggest that the early Earth did not have to be entirely molten to separate into the rocky crust and iron-rich core it has today. Researchers at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are leading the group pioneering the technique, which could lead to a wide range of new experiments.To answer the big questions, it often helps to look at the smallest details. That is the approach Stanford mineral physicist Wendy Mao...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

The ancient sea floor was discovered in southwest Greenland A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth.The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-day geology,...

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...

TORONTO, ON – According to a new study by geologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland, the wealth of some minerals that lie in the rock beneath the Earth's surface may be extraterrestrial in origin. "The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core," says James Brenan of the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience on October 18. "So, the next question...