Posts Tagged ‘Sound Money’

Putin Turns Black Gold to Bullion as Russia Outbuys the World in Gold

 :: Posted by Limited Government on 02-13-2013

Putin Turns Black Gold to Bullion as Russia Outbuys World

When Vladimir Putin says the U.S. is endangering the global economy by abusing its dollar monopoly, he’s not just talking. He’s betting on it.

Not only has Putin made Russia the world’s largest oil producer, he’s also made it the biggest gold buyer. His central bank has added 570 metric tons of the metal in the past decade, a quarter more than runner-up China, according to IMF data compiled by Bloomberg. The added gold is also almost triple the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

“The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow.

Gold, coveted by Russian rulers including Tsar Nicholas IIand the Bolshevik leader whose forces assassinated him, Vladimir Lenin, has soared almost 400 percent in the period of Putin’s purchases. Central banks around the world have printed money to escape the global financial crisis, sapping investor appetite for dollars and euros and setting off a scramble for safety.

In 1998, the year Russia defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt, it took as many as 28 barrels of crude to buy an ounce of gold, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That ratio tumbled to 11.5 by the time Putin first came to power a year later and in 2005, after it touched 6.5 — less than half what it is now — the president told the central bank to buy.

Putin’s Call

During a tour that November of the Magadan region in the Far East, where Polyus Gold International Ltd. and Polymetal International Plc have operations, Putin told Bank Rossii not to“shy away” from the metal. “After all, they’re called gold and currency reserves for a reason,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

At the time, gold was at an 18-year high of $495 an ounce and the Moscow-based central bank held 387 tons, or 2.2 percent of its $165 billion total reserves. The share reached 3.5 percent within a month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Gold for immediate delivery fell a third day today, dropping 0.6 percent to $1,657.80 an ounce as of 4:35 p.m. in Moscow. It rose 7 percent last year, the 12th straight year of gains. Analysts expect the metal to advance again in 2013, to $1,825 by the end of the year, according to the median of 26 forecasts in a Bloomberg survey.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, declined to comment today on Putin’s interest in gold.

Lucky Guy

“Putin’s gold strategy fits in with his resource nationalism, statist agenda,” said Tim Ash, head of emerging-market research at Standard Bank Plc in London. “It’s kind of a defensive play, but it worked, right?” Ash said in an interview in Moscow. “You need luck in politics and business, and clearly the guy has it.”

Other world leaders haven’t been as lucky. Gordon Brown, as U.K. finance minister, sold almost 400 tons of gold in the 30 months to March 2002, when prices were at two-decade lows. London tabloids have referred to the period as Brown’s Bottom.

Quantitative easing by major economies to support financial asset prices is driving demand for gold in the emerging world, said Marcus Grubb, head of investment research at the World Gold Council. Before the crisis, central banks were net sellers of 400 to 500 tons a year. Now, led by Russia and China, they’re net buyers by about 450 tons, Grubb said by phone from London, where his industry group is based.

‘Significant Switch’

“That’s a very significant switch, and obviously a very positive one for the gold market,” Grubb said.

While Putin is leading the gold rush in emerging markets, developed nations are liquidating. Switzerland unloaded the most in the past decade, 877 tons, an amount now worth about $48 billion, according to International Monetary Fund data through November. France was second with 589 tons, while Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal each sold more than 200 tons.

Even after Putin’s binge, though, Russia’s total cache of about 958 tons is only the eighth largest, the World Gold Council said in a Feb. 8 report. The U.S. is No. 1 with about 8,134 tons, followed by Germany with 3,391 tons and the Washington-based IMF with 2,814 tons. Italy, France, China and Switzerland are fourth through seventh. While gold accounts for 9.5 percent of Russia’s total reserves, it accounts for more than 70 percent in the U.S., Germany, Italy and France.

Truth Street

Russia keeps about two-thirds of its stockpile in a greenish gray stone-and-glass building on Ulitsa Pravdy, or Truth Street, in central Moscow. The road is named after Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, which also was headquartered there.

Then-Prime Minister Putin became the first Russian leader to visit the complex on Jan. 24, 2011, according to the government’s website. He toured the 17,000 square-meter facility, which includes 1,500 square meters of storage, with First Deputy Chairman Georgy Luntovsky, posing for photographs lifting an ingot. Most of the bars weigh 10 to 14 kilograms (22 to 31 pounds) and are boxed in plastic or wooden crates alongside an emergency supply of banknotes.

Technically, state metals depositary Gokhran has the exclusive right to buy all gold mined in the country. In practice, it lets commercial banks buy from producers directly, usually in the form of project financing, said Sergey Kashuba, chairman of the Russian Union of Gold Producers in Moscow.

When the central bank buys gold, it’s from those commercial banks, led last year by OAO Sberbank, OAO Nomos Bank, VTB Group and OAO Gazprombank, Kashuba said. Russia produced 205 tons of gold last year, making it No. 4 after China, Australia and the U.S., according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates.

Tight Security

Security is tight along the entire production chain, Kashuba said. Just two organizations are allowed to move partially refined gold from miners in the Far East and northern Siberia to processing facilities in other parts of the country, he said. One is FeldSvyaz, a courier service that reports directly to Putin. The other, SpetsSvyaz, was split off from Stalin’s NKVD secret police in 1939 to transport precious metals and state secrets, according to its website.

Russia has gone through bouts of hoarding before. Tsar Alexander II ordered his government to start amassing bullion in 1867, just months after selling Alaska, now the No. 2 gold-producing U.S. state, for $7.3 million. His grandson, Nicholas II, introduced the gold standard in 1897, then needed a loan from France to ward off speculators and save the system in 1906.

Lenin’s Link

Nicholas, Russia’s last tsar was forced to free the ruble in 1914 as war broke out in Europe. Lenin’s revolutionary government reinstated the gold link along with a new currency in 1922. While Soviet rubles were nominally backed by gold, sales of the metal to citizens were halted in 1930, making the peg meaningless.

When Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then known, in 1917, one of their first targetswas the State Bank and its gold, which they captured at 6 a.m. on Nov. 7, according to Bank Rossii’s website. They soon nationalized all the banks, confiscating any gold found in vaults and deposit boxes.

Communist Secrecy

Communist secrecy regarding the country’s gold holdings fueled speculation that party elites had amassed a huge hoard of bullion that they spirited out of the country before the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.

Viktor Gerashchenko, the last Soviet central banker and a two-time chairman of Bank Rossii, has repeatedly denied such speculation, including last February.

“When people ask about the party’s gold, my answer is always: Are you an idiot or something?” Gerashchenko, 75, told Afisha magazine.

For now, with more than five years left in Putin’s term, Russia plans to keep on buying.

“The pace will be determined by the market,” First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 25. “Whether to speed that up or slow it down is a market decision and I’m not going to discuss it.”

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-10/putin-turns-black-gold-into-bullion-as-russia-out-buys-world.html

By Scott Rose & Olga Tanas – Feb 11, 2013 7:42 AM ET

  • Share/Bookmark

China Makes Move To Collapse the U.S. Dollar: Announces a Gold Backed Currency For Global Trade

 :: Posted by Limited Government on 02-13-2013

China Makes Move To Collapse U.S. Dollar: Announces Gold Back Currency For Global Trade

The People’s Bank of China has already reduced its holdings of US treasuries below those of Japan and last announced a change in its gold reserves in 2009 when it declared a 76 per cent hike to 1,054 tonnes. Germany, Italy, France and the US keep more than 70 per cent of their reserves in gold, the last bulwark against the devaluation of money printing.

China Launching Gold Backed Global Currency 4.7 out of 5 based on 3 ratings.

According to the article, China is recasting all of their gold reserves into small one kilo bars in order to issue a new “gold-backed” currency. Many say this will disrupt global trade and will eventually cause a collapse of the US dollar.

There can be no doubt that the US dollar will soon be history. China is recasting all of their gold reserves into small one kilo bars in order to issue a new ‘gold backed’ global currency. This is surely a strategic part of their recent push to sign new trade agreements with Russia, Japan, Chile, Brazil, India, and Iran. The cat is now out of the bag, the US will be given the ‘bums rush’ by the largest trading nations in the world and the dollar will go down in flames. GATA now estimates that 80% of the gold that investors believe they have in allocated accounts is long gone, the majority of it probably wound up in China.

Here is an excerpt from Jim Willie’s ‘Hat Trick Letter’

Jims recent article starts out with…

Many are the events, signals, and telltale clues of a real live actual systemic failure in progress. Until the last several months, such banter was dismissed by the soldiers in the financial arena. But lately, they cannot dismiss the onslaught of evidence, a veritable plethora of ugly symptoms of conditions gone terribly wrong and solutions at best gone awry and at worst never intended in the first place.

CHINA RECASTS GOLD BARS

China is well along an ambitious plan to recast large gold bars into smaller 1-kg bars on a massive scale. A major event is brewing that will disrupt global trade and assuredly the global banking system. The big gold recast project points to the Chinese preparing for a new system of trade settlement. In the process they must be constructing a foundation for a possible new monetary system based in gold that supports the trade payments. Initally used for trade, it will later be used in banking. The USTBond will be shucked aside. Regard the Chinese project as preliminary to a collapse in the debt-based USDollar system. The Chinese are removing thousands of metric tons of gold bars from London, New York, and Switzerland. They are recasting the bars, no longer to bear weights in ounces, but rather kilograms. The larger Good Delivery bars are being reduced into 1-kg bars and stored in China. It is not clear whether the recast project is being done entirely in China, as some indication has come that Swiss foundries might be involved, since they have so much experience and capacity.

The story of recasting in London is confirmed by my best source. It seems patently clear that the Chinese are preparing for a new system for trade settlement system, to coincide with a new banking reserve system. They might make a sizeable portion of the new 1-kg bars available for retail investors and wealthy individuals in China. They will discard the toxic USTreasury Bond basis for banking. Two messages are unmistakable. A grand flipped bird (aka FU) is being given to the Western and British system of pounds and ounces and other queer ton measures. But perhaps something bigger is involved. Maybe a formal investigation of tungsten laced bars is being conducted in hidden manner. In early 2010, the issue of tungsten salted bars became a big story, obviously kept hush hush. The trails emanated from Fort Knox, as in pilferage of its inventory. The pathways extended through Panama in other routes known to the contraband crowd, that perverse trade of white powder known on the street as Horse & Blow, or Boy & Girl.

Source: http://worldtruth.tv/china-launching-gold-backed-global-currency/

Source: http://beforeitsnews.com/economy/2013/01/china-makes-move-to-collapse-u-s-dollar-announces-gold-back-currency-for-global-trade-2484718.html

Monday, January 28, 2013 11:35

  • Share/Bookmark

The Astonishing Ron Paul

 :: Posted by Limited Government on 12-23-2012

As 2012 draws to a close, it’s hard not to be reminded that 2013 will begin with Ron Paul retired from Congress. For all those years he was a fearless truth-teller, who exposed and denounced the horrors, domestic or foreign, of the regime. His farewell address – something practically unheard of for a congressman in the first place – will continue to be read years from now, as future Americans look back with astonishment that such a man actually served in the US Congress.

For most of his career, those speeches were delivered to a largely empty chamber and to audiences of modest size around the country. A man of Ron’s intelligence could have grown in stature and influence in no time at all had he been willing to play the game. He wasn’t. And he was perfectly at peace with the result: although he wasn’t a major political celebrity, he had done his moral duty.

Little did he know that those thankless years of pointing out the State’s lies and refusing to be absorbed into the Blob would in fact make him a hero one day. To see Ron speaking to many thousands of cheering kids, when all the while respectable opinion had been warning them to stay far away from this dangerous man, is more gratifying and encouraging than I can say. I was especially thrilled when a tempestuous Ron, responding to the Establishment’s description of his campaign as “dangerous,” said, you’re darn right – I am dangerous, to them.

 

Some people used to tell Ron that if only he’d stop talking about foreign policy he might win more supporters. He knew it was all nonsense. Foreign policy was the issue that made Ron into a phenomenon. There would have been no Ron Paul movement in the first place had Ron not distinguished himself from the pack by refusing to accept the cartoonish narrative, peddled not only by Rudy Giuliani but also by the luminaries of both major political parties, accounting for the origins of 9/11.

How many bills did he pass, right-wing scoffers demand to know. A successful Republican politician, in between his usual activity of expanding government power, is supposed to have rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic five or six times, by means of bills with his name on them. At best, the bills these politicos boast about amounted to marginal changes of momentary significance, if even that. More commonly, even the bills they trumpeted turned out to be ambiguous or actually negative from a libertarian standpoint.

What is Ron’s legacy? Not some phony bill, of zero significance in the general avalanche of statism. For his legacy, look around you.

The Federal Reserve, an issue not discussed in American politics in a hundred years, is under greater scrutiny now than ever before. Austrian economics is enjoying a rebirth that dwarfs the attention it received when F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974 – and when you ask people how they heard about the Austrian School, the universal answer is Ron Paul. One man brought about this intellectual revolution. How’s that for a legacy?

 

And that’s not to mention how many people Ron introduced to libertarian thought in general, or how many hawks reconsidered their position on war because of Ron’s arguments and example.

Even the mainstream media has to acknowledge the existence of a whole new category of thinker: one that is antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-police state, and pro-market. The libertarian view is even on the map of those who despise it. That, too, is Ron’s doing.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

How many bills did he get passed? Talk about missing the point.

Where are the hordes of students dying to learn from Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, or Mitt Romney?

Remember, too, that in politics there’s always some excuse for why the message of liberty can’t be delivered. I have to satisfy the party leadership. I have to keep the media off my back. The moment is inopportune. My constituents aren’t ready to hear it – so instead of explaining myself and persuading them, I’ll just keep my mouth shut, or minimize my position to the point where I sound like any old politician, except ten percent better.

And all the while, would-be donors are assured that this is all a facade, that the politician is really one of us and not what he appears to be. For the time being, you understand, he has to contradict his core beliefs in order to ingratiate himself into the favor of those whose support he will one day need.

Once elected, he still cannot really say what he thinks. Don’t you want him to get re-elected?

 

Ron never acted this way. At times he would explain the libertarian position in ways likely to resonate with a particular audience, but he never compromised or backed away.

It’s been said that if you ask Ron Paul a question, he gives you a straight answer. That’s an understatement. All through his presidential campaigns he sent the guardians of opinion into hysterics. Why, he can’t say that! That wasn’t even one of the choices! To the gatekeepers’ astonishment, his numbers kept on growing.

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting.

Ten years from now, no one will remember the men who opposed Ron in the GOP primaries. Half of them are forgotten already. But fifty years from now (and longer), young kids will still be learning from Ron: reading his books, following his recommendations for further study, and taking inspiration from his courage and principle.

With Ron’s Congressional career drawing to a close, we should remember that we have witnessed something highly unusual, and exceedingly unlikely to be repeated. And we should also remember Ron’s parting advice: the real revolution is not in Washington, DC. It’s in the world of ideas.

That’s what Ron is devoting the rest of his life to, and it’s one more thing he has to teach us. So watch for news of his institutionalized work for peace, his homeschooling curriculum, his homepage, and his TV network. Far from retiring, Ron Paul is stepping up his work for liberty. And in this work, there is a place for all of us.

December 21, 2012
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. – http://lewrockwell.com/rockwell/missing-ron-paul203.html

  • Share/Bookmark

The Great Man That Ron Paul Is…

 :: Posted by Limited Government on 12-21-2012
Ron Paul is WND’s ‘Man of the Decade’

Champion of the Constitution, Sound Money & Liberty Like No Other

 
RON PAUL EXPOSED!!! This Video Exposes The Great Man That Ron Paul Is & Always Has Been.  

  • Share/Bookmark

FAIR USE NOTICE: This web site may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law.