Free Republic

This chart compares gold prices and silver prices back to 1915. Each series shown is a nominal value to demonstrate the comparison in actual investment returns between each over various periods of time.

A new commemorative coin from the U.S. Mint and Treasury features a fresh depiction of Lady Liberty. With a crown of stars in her hair and a toga-like dress, she's as patriotic as ever. She's also, for the first time on an officially minted coin, portrayed as a black woman. The United States Mint unveiled the 24k gold coin in commemoration of their 225th anniversary. Gaze upon her beauty in full:

BullionDirect, Inc. has filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The case is 15-10940-tmd in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Western District of Texas (Austin). Noteworthy is that BullionDirect, Inc. now has only one direct, Dan Bensimon (President, Chief Restructuring Officer and Sole Director). I find this encouraging. It also only lists 11 unsecured creditors in the list of the 20 largest unsecured claims. This may be due to the fact that it is a Chapter 11 (e.g. Kitco's CCAA/bankruptcy filing did not include customers as creditors, as their storage customers did not appear on their balance sheet). But...

Nick at Sharelynx Gold, also known as Gold Charts "R" Us emailed an interesting chart last week showing gold drain at the New York Fed. Earmarked gold dropped 42 tonnes for the month of October as foreign countries repatriate their gold home. Here's a link to Earmarked Gold with a second chart that shows all Fed holdings. Gold Charts "R" Us has 1,000's of pages and over 10,000 charts on a subscription basis, but you can check out the site for free until December 14. Click on the first link at the top for a look. Where's the Gold Going?...

To begin with, Russia has no need to sell gold. In fact, Russia added 150 tonnes of gold to its Central Bank holdings in August, September and October. It didn’t make any sense that Russia would then turn around and sell gold. Why? Russia runs a current account surplus - LINK. It has cash on its balance sheet. Something the U.S. can only dream about, as the U.S. Government has to issue debt every hour to fund itself. The last time the U.S. sniffed a positive balance of payments was in the 1980’s. Second, Russia just got through paying down...

Tyler Durden 06/06/2014 Two years ago, stories of fake tungsten-filled gold coins and bars began to spread; it appears, between the shortage of physical gold (after Asian central bank buying) and the increase in smuggling (courtesy of India's controls among others) that gold fraud is back on the rise. As SCMP reports, a mainland China businessman, Zhao Jingjun, discovered that HK$270 million of 998kg of gold bars he bought in Ghana had been swapped for non-precious metal bars. What is perhaps even more worrisome, given the probe into commodity-financing deals and the rehypothecation evaporation; these gold bars were shipped to...

The German central bank, or Bundesbank, said Monday that it stepped up the repatriation of its gold reserves from overseas storage last year. “The Bundesbank successfully continued and further stepped up its transfers of gold,” the central bank said in a statement. “In 2014, 120 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt from storage locations abroad: 35 tonnes from Paris and 85 tonnes from New York.” Germany’s gold reserves are the second-biggest in the world after those of the United States and totaled 3,384.2 tonnes this month, according to the latest data compiled by the World Gold Council. …

On January 16, 2013 Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, said it will ship back home all 374 tonnes it had stored with the Banque de France in Paris, as well as 300 tonnes held in Manhattan by the US Federal Reserve, by 2020. Fast forward a year and Buba, as the Federal Bank of Germany is affectionately (or maybe not) known, has only managed to bring home a paltry 37 tonnes of gold. And a mere 5 tonnes of that came from the US, the rest from Paris. The US Fed holds 45% of the total 3,396 tonnes German gold....

Criminal scams are not unique to the precious metals industry, as it is but one minor niche of the massive financial markets. However, it is the industry in which I participate. Where possible, I try to help would-be buyers of physical precious metals avoid the crooks. There are many different ways that unscrupulous dealers may try to take advantage of uninformed buyers, but today I want to focus on the problem with people purchasing and paying for merchandise, then never receiving their goods. There have been some operations that never delivered promised merchandise right from the beginning. Such crooks tend...

March 3, 2014 3:45PM As we predicted/requested on Friday, The Tulving Company has gone out of business, as of Monday morning. They are no longer answering their phones, and we have reliable information confirming that they are ceasing operations. This page will be updated as more information comes in. There is a lot of information on our old page about The Tulving Company. We hope to update this page with information about what will happen next. At this point, our best guess is that The Tulving Company will file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, we believe that there will be little in...

You were considered a hoarder and a slacker if you still resisted turning over your gold to the government. ... most of those who voted for FDR never expected him to confiscate private holdings of gold coins, bullion, and certificates. Roosevelt called the measure a temporary one (it wasn’t), and he followed it up by invalidating gold clauses in private contracts that obligated payment in gold dollars, which had the effect of devaluing the assets of bond and contract holders. ... By January 1934, Roosevelt increased the dollar price of gold from $20.67 to $35, thus devaluing the dollar by...

Report of 1 Kilo Gold Bar Filled with Tungsten Found in UK March 26, 2012 “What appears to be a tungsten filled gold bar has been found – this time in the UK. It is believed that a scrap dealer bought the Metalor 1 kilo gold bar of 99.98% purity from a member of the public. Metalor are a leading international gold refiner and bar manufacturer, headquartered in Zurich. The bar appears to have been tampered with and may have had holes drilled into it or melted out and then had tungsten rods inserted or tungsten poured into the holes....

Liquidation Of Customer Stored Gold And Silver Bullion From MF Global Commodities / Gold and Silver 2011 Dec 17, 2011 - 12:27 PM By: Jesse The bottom line is that apparently some warehouses and bullion dealers are not a safe place to store your gold and silver, even if you hold a specific warehouse receipt. In an oligarchy, private ownership is merely a concept, subject to interpretation and confiscation. Although the details and the individual perpetrators are yet to be disclosed, what is now painfully clear is that the CFTC and CME regulated futures system is defaulting on its obligations....

This week we returned from a trip to the Eurozone where we met with a host of different people across many countries and several industries. All of the indicators we’re seeing – construction starts, bank lending, personal borrowing habits, economic growth, and even the (lack of) items in grocery store carts – suggest that Europe is on the brink, though as is generally the case, the average European has no clue what’s coming their way. The most alarming situation we identified is one relating to the purchase of gold coins and bullion – specifically in the country of Austria –...

Banks are charging more to store gold after a surge in demand for precious metals has left London, the centre of the global bullion market, short of vault space. Almost all of the major bullion-dealing banks have raised fees since March this year, in some cases more than doubling the rates they charge for vaulting gold, according to clients of the banks and people familiar with the situation. The development is a further sign of how demand for assets which are seen as safe is straining the financial system. Bank of New York Mellon announced last week it would start...

For some time some of the more outspoken gold commentators, like GATA, have been suggesting that title is held to far more gold and silver supposedly stored in bank's vaults, than is actually there - indeed they even have been questioning Central Banks' holdings of physical bullion - even in Fort Knox. Now there is some anecdotal evidence emerging on the internet and news programmes that may serve to back up some of these claims, at least as far as some commercial banks are concerned. -snip- A couple of days ago King World News of the U.S. quoted Jim Rickards,...

THERE'S a worldwide run on gold coins. Even as the price of the precious metal itself comes under pressure along with commodities like oil and copper, people around the world are demanding so many of the valuable coins that government mints are having difficulty filling orders. A spokesperson for the US Mint tells me that gold coins in this country, for the past month, "are being allocated because of an increased demand." And the price that the government charges coin dealers has recently been increased by as much as 10 percent for a 10-ounce coin. Robert Mish, a coin dealer...

"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a pine tree, worth $4,000-$5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?" - Kenneth J. Gerbino The price of gold tells us a lot about ourselves. It holds up a mirror to the way we are governed, our economy and its prospects. It reflects not only the physical dangers of floods, famine, terrorism and war, but also the financial perils of systemic addiction to debt and budgetary incontinence. "The modern mind dislikes gold," said Joseph Schumpeter,...

Modern gold rush tapping historic veins VICTORIA is in the grip of a second gold rush, with the opening of new mines under its historic gold towns set to deliver a $700million-a-year boom. Deep beneath Ballarat and Bendigo, workers are tapping into reefs of gold-bearing quartz that the miners of yesteryear were unable to recover and which have lain dormant for more than a century. The Victorian Government predicts these new mines and a string of others across the historic goldfields will deliver a further 80 million ounces - or $56 billion worth - of gold, and turn the state...

NOTHING swells the breast so much as the thought that you have been proved right at last. After riding high at the start of the 1980s, gold bugs had a miserable couple of decades. The price declined relentlessly, mocking their credo that the security of the financial system ultimately depends upon the yellow metal. Lately, though, the faithful have enjoyed their reward. In the past five years the price of gold has doubled. This week in Asian trading it briefly surpassed $500 a troy ounce—a level last breached in 1987. You can almost feel the bugs' excitement as the message...