"Got tungsten?"
Posted on 09/19/2014 9:41:52 AM PDT by C19fan
The super-rich are looking to protect their wealth through buying record numbers of "Italian job" style gold bars, according to bullion experts. The number of 12.5kg gold bars being bought by wealthy customers has increased 243pc so far this year, when compared to the same period last year, said Rob Halliday-Stein founder of BullionByPost. "These gold bars are usually stored in the vaults of central banks and are the same ones you see in the film 'The Italian Job'," added David Cousins, bullion executive from London based ATS Bullion.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Tungsten alert! Is there really enough gold for all that action?
Unless I had a third party drill out and sample the bar, I would be suspicious.
The problem with taking your gold in 12.5 kg chunks is that, after TEOTWAWKI you will have to wait for the restoration of governments and markets in order to move it.
The little tiny round things, OTOH, could be usable before Nirvana.
Physical gold? maybe. Paper gold? definitely.
I like 1 ounce American Silver Eagles.
Drilling gold is invasive. I wonder if there is reliable, accurate, and non-invasive method to determine whether something is gold or tungsten.
Tungsten has an atomic weight of 183.84, Gold is 196.97 so displacement in water of gold would be less than that of tungsten for equal weights.
A non-invasive method to very accurately measure density to correlate with atomic would be very useful. Of course, one would also have to compensate for alloys with small amounts of copper, as most gold coins contain some copper for hardening. I would think that if SHTF, such a device would be useful especially as the gold price would rise in a crisis along with counterfeiting.
“These gold bars are usually stored in the vaults of central banks”
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Therein lies the issue with ownership. If one doesn’t physically possess it, there’s nothing to stop confiscation “for the children,” “for the public good,” etc.
There is such a device, and it works using transmissivity of the metal of sound waves passed entirely through the ingot-under test. The generic name for the machine escapes me at the moment. Whereas so-called “XRF” guns use (I believe) X-ray diffraction and so they can be fooled (by foil, or even heavy plating) because they only “sample” very very shallowly into the surface of the item under test. Only a few dozen atoms deep.
The specific gravity comparison between Tungsten and gold seems like it should be fairly easy and telling, but it isn’t. You cite “atomic weight” but the test is (as you say) water displacement and the two numbers you cite are only about 6% apart. A comparison between the sp gravity of W vs gold however is 19600 vs 19320 which is only 1.5% apart. That is a margin that is darn close to undetectable without yes, sensitive lab instruments (which are commonly available) but pretty serious lab technique.
There are some allows of silver alloyed with lead (aka pewter) that are sp gravity wise virtually indistinguishable from pure silver.
Where there is value, there is inducement for fraud. I believe that came to be a known human trait shortly after the abacus was invented. No racial slur intended!
The super-rich didn’t get that way by being stupid. They have insider knowledge about what is about to happen to the global economy. And it isn’t pretty. Soon you will be able to use your stock certificates and fiat currency as toilet paper.
Proton-induced X-ray emission maybe? Tungsten has less attenuation than gold, I suspect. Of course one could imagine a composite material that would fool the detectors and still meet the density requirement.
Maybe multiple tests to get at the facts. A real gold bar has to pass every test.
Yeah, I suspect that can be fooled too. But I forgot that gold and tungsten require dangerous energy levels for significant penetration by protons or xray.
The significant industry of gold-plated everything in China means there will be no end to this. I suspect gold will lose it's lustre...
Interesting, thanks.
I suppose standard government minted coins are not bad because at least there are physical features and published weights for the coins, and a bad counterfeit (in terms of weight) would be detectable unless the counterfeiter had good method of combining cheaper alloys and plating with gold.
Kind of depends upon how frequently the “assessor” (aka the potential buyer) sees the items in question. As time goes on, the Chinese have gotten better and better at counterfeiting (first) US silver dollars, then silver eagles. Eagles, as you may or may not know, have some very fine details and of course, do not circulate as currency, so they are almost always in choice, top-notch condition. Hence, those details are intact. OTOH, old silver dollars were produced in ASTRONOMICAL quantities and many DID circulate (and many were held in dresser drawers) There are crappy ones and choice ones. The danger for the unsavvy buyer IMO is in buying average condition silver dollars at attractive prices and getting glud. Why does this happen? Because the unsavvy buyer doesn’t eat & breathe silver dollars every day.
So...silver dollars. OK, most people have seen them but do they look at them every day, several times a day? On clumsy copies, sure, those can be easy to detect, but as time goes on, a potential buyer needs to be more and more and more familiar with teeny details and develop a “spidey sense” about what he/she is buying on these things. It’s like Democrats, they don’t care how many times they fail, they’ll just rework their dies and try again next month.
Does the author think most people wouldn’t know what a “gold bar” was without the movie reference?
Well, when all the world’s ‘political leaders’ are obviously and unashamedly out to grab anything and everything in banks, this sort of thing happens.
I’m tired of hearing how gold is going to 2000 or 3000 and NOW is the time to buy silver, blah, blah, blah.
I have been hearing this for 4 years as both metals keep going down.
There must not be many of them, because they sure haven’t moved the market. Gold was down nearly $10.00 today. Now maybe the physical market is higher, but I don’t travel in the ‘400 ounce bar of bullion’ circles. A few coins a year is more my speed.
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