'Bitcoin is fool's gold': Peter Schiff weighs in on calls to replace gold with cryptocurrencies

RT 

The value of digital currencies cannot be on par with gold, veteran stock broker and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff, told RT's Keiser Report as they discussed the recent #DropGold campaign.

Last week, a New York-based crypto-asset investment firm Grayscale Investments (Grayscale), ran a TV commercial, showing people pulling shopping cart full of gold bars, trying to convince investors that bitcoin is "displacing gold" as we live in a "new financial era."

The "ridiculous" advertisement is just a farce, according to Schiff, who stressed that cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin in particular, have nothing in common with the precious metal and have "no intrinsic value" other than people willing to buy it. 

"Bitcoin tries to pretend to be gold, but I think it's fool gold," the broker said in an interview with Max Keiser. He explained that the most-valuable digital currency may have some of the monetary properties of gold, but none of the commodity properties.

"There is no value to store in bitcoin ... When you're storing bitcoin you're storing nothing," Schiff said. 

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Countries Around The World Are Bringing Gold Home

Zero Hedge

European Central Bank’s President Mario Draghi recently announced that the ECB would be required to approve any management of gold reserves within the euro zone countries. The statement was specifically directed at two Italian members.

Why was Italy singled out? According to the Wall Street Journal, Italian citizens are preparing to take control of Italy’s gold reserves. During the past few years, a multitude of small investors lost billions of dollars due to the failure of several Italian banks. The Bank of Italy is seen as an elitist, inefficient entity indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio is leading the attack against Italy’s central bank, along with the “5 Star Movement” and the nationalist “League,” all of whom blame the countries financial woes on the incompetence of the central bank.

The 5 Star Movement is asking Italy’s Parliament to approve measures that would allow private banks to sell their share in The Bank of Italy at 1930’s prices. Taking it a step further, they are also demanding that ownership of the Bank of Italy’s 2,451.8 tons of gold be taken over by the country’s citizens and spent on populist policies. The current value of these gold reserves is $102 billion.

If these laws are passed, investors would be able to sell gold and greatly deplete the central bank’s reserves. As Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy states, “The gold belongs to the Italians, not the bankers.” 

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Bank of England refused to return $1.2bn in gold to Venezuela – reports

RT

Britain rejected Venezuela’s request to withdraw $1.2bn in gold stored in the UK, according to reports. It was enough for the self-declared and US-backed ‘president’, Juan Guaido, to support the alleged move.

The Bank of England blocked Venezuela’s attempts to retrieve $1.2 billion worth of gold stored as the nation’s foreign reserves in Britain, sources told Bloomberg on Friday.

According to the media outlet, officials in Caracas have for weeks been trying to withdraw the gold, with Calixto Ortega, the head of Venezuela’s central bank, traveling to London in mid-December to seek access to the nation’s assets.

The talks were “unsuccessful,” as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the national security advisor to President Donald Trump, John Bolton, pressured their British counterparts to freeze the Venezuelan assets, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

By some estimates, Venezuela holds more than $8 billion in foreign reserves. According to earlier reports, the amount of Venezuelan gold kept in the Bank of England doubled in recent months, growing from 14 to 31 tons.

The South American nation has reportedly experienced problems in extracting its own gold from the Bank of England in the past. Bankers in Britain were allegedly concerned that Venezuelan officials would sell the state-owned gold “for personal gain.”

The Bank of England, along with press officials for Pompeo and Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, declined to comment.

Despite the fact that the story was not confirmed, the alleged move of the British bank was swiftly praised by the self-proclaimed ‘interim president’ of Venezuela. “The process of protecting the assets of Venezuela has begun,” Juan Guaido tweeted.

“We will not allow more abuse and theft of money intended for food, medicine and the future of our children.”

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Gold Joins The Global "Death Cross" Procession

Zero Hedge

While US mega-tech stocks support the belief that all is well for many Americans, a glance around the world and the shit is seriously hitting the fan...

Downtrends are everywhere and 'death crosses' are popping up in asset classes from Chinese stocks to global Systemically-Important Banks and most recently gold...

The crossing of the 50-day moving average below the 200-day moving average has been long used a signal of trend change and more euphemistically is known as the "death cross."

Gold is now suffering...

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If you want to preserve your wealth for times of turmoil, buy physical gold

RT

Gold, which is traditionally seen as a safe haven, is usually subject to the whims of supply and demand. Its value changes quickly, pushing the bullion price to extremely high levels at times.

The yellow metal also makes a habit of performing poorly when the stock market is doing well. But gold is the ultimate store of value, according to precious metals expert Ronan Manly of Singapore's BullionStar.

"What this means is that gold retains its purchasing power over long periods. Gold's purchasing power is not eroded by inflation as it is an inflation hedge," the analyst told RT. "In contrast, fiat currencies such as the US dollar are not stores of value. Fiat currency purchasing power is consistently eroded by inflation, and over time fiat currencies, such as the US dollar, lose nearly all of their purchasing power relative to gold."  

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The Dollar’s 70-Year Dominance Slowly Coming To An End

Alex Deluce
Gold Telegraph 

The US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, but that might change soon. 

Republican Congressman Alex Mooney is proposing that the US once again place value on the dollar by backing it with physical gold. The problem is, the Federal Reserve has been printing money with the abandon of a drunken copy machine, and the 147.3 million ounces of gold being held in Ft. Knox may not be enough to cover the out-of-control fiat currency currently in circulation.

According to Alex Mooney’s bill, the dollar has decreased 30 percent in purchasing power since 2000. It has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913. On an average, the US is devalued by 50 percent every generation. 

If the gold standard were to be reinstated, control of the dollar would revert to free market forces instead of the whim of the Federal Reserve. It would mean that each dollar would have its equivalent in gold, as it did prior to 1913. At that time, the US economy grew at a robust annual rate of 4 percent compared to an average annual growth of 2 percent since 2000. 

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"They Know What's Going To Happen" - Governments, Big Banks Are Stockpiling Gold

Marc Slavo
SHTF.com 

The writing is on the wall and major financial institutions across the world are warning about the economic disaster to come. Unabated money printing, tariff trade wars, rising interest rates and retail slowdowns point to one result, and it’s going to be brutal. Big banks and governments know what’s coming and they are preparing for this eventuality by stockpiling huge amounts of “real money” ahead of the crisis.

According to Keith Neumeyer, the CEO of the world’s top primary silver producer First Majestic Silver and chairman of First Mining Gold, the cartels he’s previously reported to the CFTC have continued to manipulate the prices of precious metals while loading up their own vaults with gold and silver. The answer to why they’re doing it is simple, as Neumeyer highlights in a recent interview with SGT Report:

The verdict is still out on whether we’re going into a dis-inflationary or inflationary environment… gold can do well in both environments… the fact of the matter is governments are printing extraordinary amounts of fiat currencies and that is not going to change…
The stage is set for higher gold prices due to the amount of money being printed… I am of the belief a major reset is coming where the governments of the world will need to get rid of their debt by fixing everything to the price of gold… and that’s why governments like China and Russia and other governments around the world are accumulating gold… it’s because they know what’s going to happen over the next several years…

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Europe Says It Wants to Confiscate Money, Precious Metals, Crypto Currency and Prepaid Cards to Fight Terrorism

Anon HQ

 

The proposal wants to monitor and tighten the control over electronic crypto and electronic currencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, along with debit and credit cards in the EU, and is applicable to all those who travel. 

 

The European Commission wants to tighten its control over paper money, metals such as gold and silver, and other precious elements that are transferred into the European Union. Their reasoning is to monitor the funding, as it will lessen the funding for belligerent attacks in the European Union.

The Commissions’ decision was based on the Marketplace attack that took place last Christmas in Germany, where people were killed as a truck full of explosives drove into the crowded place.

The new proposal will give power to customs officials in the European Union nations, allowing them to check cash amounts at random, and check credit and debit statements that are sent using postal services. Customs in these states will also have the right to take away cash, precious metals or anything of value that is being carried by people who fit the profile when entering the European Union.

As we all know, if anyone is carrying more than 10,000 Euros in cash while travelling must be declared at customs when entering the European Union; the new rules will permit customs officers to confiscate the money – even if it is fewer than 10,000 Euros – if they suspect someone of having a criminal past or if the money is for criminal activity.

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Jim Sinclair-Financial Pressure Cooker Bomb Cooking Now

Greg Hunter

 Renowned gold expert Jim Sinclair says, “You have a pressure cooker bomb cooking like the terrorists use. It’s cooking, and it makes gold a storehouse of value and not a currency. It’s just a storehouse of value. It turns it into a savings account. The only one that will work. The only one without a counter-party. The only one that doesn’t need a market that can trade in physical (metal) and huge size physical. China and Russia are not buying gold as some sort of investment. They are buying it as a policy because they see clearly that is no tool left in anybody’s toolbox to fix what the geeks have done. They have killed us, and they have killed themselves. There is one fat shark out there that is now about to experience starvation.”

In closing, Sinclair says, “When it’s all said and done, there will be a catastrophic big bang, and then the only thing that will be left is your savings account. Your savings account is not silver, although it will outperform gold, your savings account is going to be gold. It’s going to happen because all currencies, even the roaring dollar, are falling in terms of being a storehouse of value. Capitalism is finished. I can’t tell you what the next system will be, but capitalism is over because the heart of capitalism is markets. Without markets, you cannot have a capitalistic system—it’s over.”

Join Greg Hunter for one of the most compelling and enlightening interviews of the year with renowned market and gold expert Jim Sinclair of JSMineset.com.

All links can be found on USAWatchdog.com: http://usawatchdog.com/we-have-killed...

THE SUBPRIME U.S. ECONOMY: Disintegrating Due To Subprime Auto, Housing, Bond & Energy Debt

SRSrocco Report

The U.S. financial system continues to disintegrate even though most Americans hardly notice.  The system is being gutted from the inside out... much the same way a chronic disease weakens a patient even before any symptoms are felt.  However, we are already experiencing painful symptoms as U.S. economic indicators continue to weaken.

Here are just a few of the recent headlines:

Energy Giant Schlumberger Fires Another 8,000 As "Market Conditions Worsen" in Q2

The Financial System Is Breaking Down At An Unimaginable Pace

Potential Crisis Triggers Continue To Pile Up In 2016

Just In Time—–Big Wall Street Housing Investors Cashing-Out On Housing Bubble 2.0

Corporate Bond Defaults Hit Highest Rate Since Financial Crisis

These are just some of the recent headlines pointing to BIG TROUBLE AHEAD.  However, the U.S. financial system is in dire shape due to the SUBPRIMING of the entire economy.  Today, anyone can purchase a car for little or nothing down and finance it for 84 months.  The U.S. housing market is also in the same predicament.

According to the article, Are We Heading for Another Housing Crisis?, published on May 12th this year:

While the economy and home prices have both rebounded, some people have expressed concern we are headed for a repeat housing bubble. As of January 2016, home prices were rising at a rate twice that of inflation, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.

What's more, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have unveiled programs to allow first-time homebuyers to make a purchase with only 3 percent down. Plus, some lenders are using alternate credit scores, which may make loans available to those who can't get one under conventional credit scoring methods.

So, here we are heading down the same path as we did prior to the 2008 U.S. Investment Banking and Housing collapse.  However, this time around its both a Subprime Auto & Housing problem.  But, that is just part of the Subprime mess.

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Greenspan Warns A Crisis Is Imminent, Urges A Return To The Gold Standard

Comment: How this guy has the gall to give advice to anyone after his role in economics is beyond me.

-------------------

Zero Hedge

On Friday afternoon, after the shocking Brexit referendum, while being interviewed by CNBC Alan Greenspan stunned his hosts when he said that things are about as bad as he has ever seen. 

"This is the worst period, I recall since I've been in public service. There's nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away. I'd love to find something positive to say."

Strangely enough, he was not refering to the British exodus but to America's own economic troubles. 

Today, Greenspan was on Bloomberg Surveillance where in an extensive, 30 minutes interview he was urged to give his take on the British referendum outcome. According to Greenspan, David Cameron miscalculated and made a “terrible mistake” in holding a referendum. That decision led to a “terrible outcome in all respects,” Greenspan said. "It didn’t have to happen.” Greenspan then noted that as a result of Brexit, "we are in very early days a crisis which has got a way to go", and point to Scotland which he said will likely have another referendum on its own, predicting the vote would be successful, and Northern Ireland would “probably” go the same way. 

His remarks then centered on the Eurozone which he defined as a truly “vulnerable institution,” primarily due to Greece’s inclusion in its structure. “Get Greece out. They’re a toxic liability sitting in the middle of a very important economic zone." Ironically, the same Eurozone has spent countless hours doing everything in its power to show just how unbreakable the union is by preserving Greece, while it took the UK just one overnight session to break away. Luckily the UK was not part of the monetary union or else it would be game over.

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Economic insiders warn of upcoming system failure

Stefan Gleason
Activist Post

With each passing day, systemic risks in the financial system become greater. Smart money insiders and billionaire investors are taking note - and taking defensive actions.

Mega-billionaire Carl Icahn, whose long-term track record is unrivaled, recently warned that "there will be a day of reckoning unless we get fiscal stimulus." Icahn's hedge fund is betting on a day of reckoning scenario. He has gone 150% net short the stock market while holding commodity-related positions to the long side.

International currency speculator and leftist financier George Soros has slashed his fund's overall equity holdings by 25%. Like him or not, Soros is no dummy when it comes to the financial system. He is an establishment insider who apparently sees turbulent times ahead. He owns a not insignificant amount of gold, and his largest single equity holding now is Barrick Gold (NYSE:ABX), a major gold mining company.

"The system itself is at risk," warns bond market wizard Bill Gross. In his latest market commentary, Gross cites "artificially high asset prices and a distortion of future risk relative to potential return."  

Prices for financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate investment trusts are artificially high because interest rates are artificially low. Thanks, of course, to the Federal Reserve. Markets are floating on a sea of leverage made possible by eight years of ultra-accommodative monetary policy and the widespread belief that the Fed will step in as a buyer of last resort to support asset prices.  

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Gold: Welcome To The Weimar Death Spiral

Dave Kranzler
Investment Research Dynamics 

For starters, I want to re-emphasize the importance of getting your money OUT of fiat currency and OUT of U.S. banks.  If you read this article and do not come to that conclusion, you will end up getting what you deserve:  Commerzbank To Hoard Euros  The Fed is devaluing the dollar every day.   My solution for day to day cash management is Bitgold.  I am not an “ambassador” or “affiliate.”  But I am convinced that it’s the best viable means of managing money that requires “fungability” – i.e. that you need for daily expenses.  You can sign-up for Bitgold here:   Gold-Backed “Checking” Account.  Bitgold operates OUTSIDE of the global Central Banking system.

Second, a colleague of mine told me he knows why the stock market is up today – because it’s open.   That’s not entirely a joke.  But what is a joke is the underlying cause:  rampant global money printing disguised as “quantitative easing  – or Central Bank asset monetization.”

Goodbye Keynes, hello Havenstein.  The Fed and the ECB have resorted to Weimar-style money printing.   The lack of transparency makes it easy for them to impose various forms of disguise to hide the outright money printing.   Today the ECB rolled out its program to buy corporate bonds.  It prints money and buys the bonds of U.S. and European corporations.  The disguised name is “quantitative easing.”

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US debt dumped as central banks and billionaires buy gold

Hang the Bankers

Central banks have been dumping U.S. debt at an unprecedented rate.

Last year, foreign central banks sold an astonishing $225 billion in U.S. treasury bonds. And now, just a few months into 2016, the rate of selling has increased, with central banks having already sold $123 billion in bonds.

Once regarded as a safe haven, the perception of bonds has changed in recent years, with much of the blame going to our Federal Reserve and a significant loss in confidence in the central bank. Now, the trend away from U.S. debt is becoming increasingly clear. And as nations continue to sell, we may be a snowball effect of more countries following suit — because no one wants to be the last ones left holding an asset that no one wants.

What happens when there is no one there to buy the debt except for the Federal Reserve? They are the buyer of last resort. Will they start feasting on their arm to save themselves? How long can they buy their own debt for before there is nothing left to chew on?

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Scientists turn gold into foam as light as air & malleable by hand

RT

 

Guess the riddle: what is almost as light as air and as precious as gold? Well, actually, it is gold, Swiss scientists say. Researchers at ETH Zurich claim to have created a new type of the metal, the lightest ever produced.

The new material has taken the form of a foam, which is a thousand times lighter than solid gold. Yet, according to the researchers, it's next to impossible to tell the difference with the naked eye, because the so-called aerogel also boasts a metallic sheen. The gold foam is soft and malleable by hand. It consists of 98 parts air and only two parts of solid material. Of this solid material, over four-fifths are gold, and less than one-fifth is milk protein fibrils. 

This corresponds to around 20 carat gold, according to the researchers at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

A three-dimensional mesh of gold consists mostly of pores. "It is lighter than water and almost as light as air," Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials, who led the research, said.

The scientists managed to create this porous material by heating milk proteins to produce nanometer-fine protein fibres, so-called amyloid fibrils, which they later placed in a solution of gold salt. The protein fibres interlaced forming a basic structure, along which the gold simultaneously crystallised into tiny particles. This resulted in a gel-like gold fibre network, the scientists explained.

"One of the big challenges was how to dry this fine network without destroying it," said Gustav Nyström, first author of the corresponding study in the journal Advanced Materials.
It's hoped that the new material could be used in many ways, thanks to the substance's unique properties, such as its weight and porous structure. Applications in watches and jewellery are two of the obvious possibilities. Another application demonstrated by the scientists is chemical catalysis. Given that the highly porous material has a huge surface, chemical reactions that depend on the presence of gold can be run in an efficient manner, researchers say.

Financial Times calls for abolishing cash in order to "to give more power to central banks"

Paul Joseph Watson
Global Research /
With comments by sott.net

The Financial Times has published an anonymous article which calls for the abolition of cash in order to give central banks and governments more power.

Entitled The case for retiring another 'barbarous relic', the article laments the fact that people are stockpiling cash in anticipation of another economic collapse, a factor which is causing, "a lot of distortion to the economic system."

Comment: People should be stockpiling cash, precious metals and all sorts of supplies in anticipation of a probable economic collapse. The only "distortion to the economic system" will be in the distorted minds of individuals who experience a sense of loss of control over individuals who would seek to protect themselves and persevere through the turmoil to come.

"The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a zero interest rate — limits central banks' ability to stimulate a depressed economy. The worry is that people will change their deposits for cash if a central bank moves rates into negative territory," states the article.

Complaining that cash cannot be tracked and traced, the writer argues that its abolition would, "make life easier for a government set on squeezing the informal economy out of existence."

Comment: What about the government making life easier for the people that they are supposed to serve? But that doesn't quite enter the equation does it? 'Informal' economies, or black markets as they are sometimes called, are the only way the vast majority of normal people can make it through the really tough times.

Have a listen to Dmitry Orlov a Russian engineer who's lived through Soviet Russia's collapse in the early 90's:

SOTT Talk Radio #66 - Lessons from collapse of USSR for USA: Interview with Dmitry Orlov
and read: Dmitry Orlov interview: Are Americans prepared for a Soviet style collapse?

Abolishing cash would also give governments more power to lift taxes directly from people's bank accounts, the author argues, noting how "Value added tax, for example, could be automatically levied — and reimbursed — in real time on transactions between liable bank accounts."

The writer also calls for punishing people who use cash by making users "pay for the privilege of anonymity" so they will, "remain affected by monetary policy." Dated bank notes would lose their value over time, while people would also be charged by banks for swapping electronic reserves for physical cash and vice versa.   

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The Worth of Gold Growing by the Day

F.William Engdahl
Land Destroyer 


NEOThe worth of gold in the world is growing by the day. That might seem like a paradox but it isn’t. The worth of gold is not fixed on the Comex futures exchange, or the trade in London or Zurich. True, most of the gold-trading public takes its cue today from the CME’s COMEX gold futures price where it does not at all look like the worth of a bar of gold is growing. Why can we then speak of gold’s worth rising?

On Comex the price of gold futures has gone from a high of $1896 in August 2011 to current lows of $1099, lows last seen six years ago, tendency downward. Here we come to the fallacy of composition where we extrapolate from one particular to the universal, when we assume that something is true of the whole just because it is true of some part of the whole.

The COMEX gold futures market in New York and the Over-the-Counter (OTC) trades cleared through the London Bullion Market Association do set prices which are followed most widely in the world. They are also markets dominated by a handful of huge players, the six London Bullion Market Association gold clearing banks–the corrupt JP MorganChase bank; the scandal-ridden UBS bank of Zurich; The Bank of Nova Scotia – ScotiaMocatta, the world’s oldest bullion bank which began as banker to the British East India Company, the group that ran the China Opium Wars; the scandal-ridden Deutsche Bank; the scandal-ridden Barclays Bank of London; HSBC of London, the house bank of the Mexican drug cartels; and the scandal and fraud-ridden Societe Generale of Paris.

Key central banks, notably the Federal Reserve and Bank of England, have been accused of colluding with the major clearing banks to artifically smash gold prices when, as they did in August 2011, gold threatened to get out of control and endanger the dollar’s role as world reserve currency primus. Organizations representing gold investors such as GATA have documented in detail for years how the manipulations of the gold price was carried out.

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Central Bankers Gather privately In Washington to Discuss "gold, the renminbi, and the multicurrency system"

Gatae

Attention, mainstream financial journalists! Here’s something else important for you to ignore this week, thanks to the diligent eye of gold researcher and GATA consultant Ronan Manly.

It’s a breakfast meeting to be held Friday in Washington for “a select group of central banks and other official-sector institutions,” sponsored by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum and the World Gold Council, to discuss “gold, the renminbi, and the multicurrency system,” convened in conjunction with the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group, a United Nations agency:

http://www.omfif.org/meetings/briefings/

“Discussions,” the discreet announcement from OMFIF says, “are under Chatham House Rules,” whereby information may be used but never attributed:

http://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule

While many nations with central banks purport to be representative democracies and while the World Gold Council purports to be the representative of the gold industry, some of whose participants actually have to get their hands dirty every day —

http://www.gold.org/about-us

— attendance at Friday’s meeting will be by invitation only. So for the record GATA has requested one.

But if you don’t get an invitation, you can fairly assume that the valuation of all capital, labor, goods, and services in the world is none of your business. This is after all the central bankers’ world. The rest of us are lucky that they let us even pass through it from time to time, though the impertinent among us might wonder why central bankers should need to talk in secret about something supposedly as irrelevant and retrograde as gold.

Good thing for them that mainstream financial journalists have neither curiosity nor backbone.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

"De-Dollarization" Deepens: Russia Buys Most Gold In Six Months, Continues Selling US Treasuries

Zero Hedge

The rumors of Russia selling its gold reserves, it is now clear, were greatly exaggerated as not only did Putin not sell, Russian gold reserves rose by their largest amount in six months in December to just over $46 billion (near the highest since April 2013). It appears all the "Russia is selling" chatter did was lower prices enabling them to gather non-fiat physical assets at a lower cost. On the other hand, there is another trend that continues for the Russians - that of reducing their exposure to US Treasury debt. For the 20th month in a row, Russia's holdings of US Treasury debt fell year-over-year - selling into the strength.  

 
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See also:  Germany continues to repatriate gold: Bundesbank

It's official: US stole Ukraine's gold

Dmitry Orlov
Club Orlov

This just in: it turns out that the rumors were right after all. At least part of the reason the US State Dept./CIA staged a coup in Ukraine that overthrew its democratically elected government and installed a neo-Nazi puppet regime was to steal Ukraine's gold. Rumor had it that shortly after the coup the gold was quietly loaded onto a plane that took it to the US. And now comes the official revelation: Ukraine has no gold reserves left. The gold was sold to pay for a failed military campaign in Eastern Ukraine, and to prop up the fake paper gold market for a little bit longer. One would expect that once the fix is off, the price of gold will skyrocket, the US dollar will drop like a rock, and Americans will need to add the word “hyperinflation” to their list of national woes.