Free Republic

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...

There is a growing body of evidence now to support the theory that Western enviro-pillaging is leading to the flip-flop of the Earth's magnetic field. The acclaimed Indian science journal Jonwar Chodu recently published a controversial piece denouncing the Western World's mining of metal in 3rd world countries. But not for the normal reasons of hegemonic multinational imperialism - itself a good reason to stop all this horrible mining... No, this time it was for a reason far worse. You see, when you take metals from one part of the world, depleting them from whole regions almost entirely, and then...

Scientists have proposed a radical new model for the make-up of the Earth's core. The study may explain a longstanding puzzle about the most inaccessible part of our planet. It suggests that differences between the east and west hemispheres of the core are explained by the way iron atoms pack together. ... Lying more than 5,000km beneath our feet, at the centre of the Earth, the core is beyond the reach of direct investigation. Broadly speaking, it consists of a solid sphere of metal sitting within a liquid outer core. The inner core started to solidify more than a billion...

Ultra high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provides clear evidence that the planet's accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after Earth was formed. During the formation of Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals -- such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core to cover the entire surface of Earth with a...

A global clash of nations is underway in full gear. The time is finally right. The urgency is acute. The banking system insolvency is widespread. The illiquidity has reached the surface. The geopolitical chessboard has busy movements of many pieces, even with a delayed check in Ukraine after a devious capture of the Cyprus castle but not the Syrian knight. The Saudi support via OPEC for the Petro-Dollar has fallen out of view, dragging its pummeled chin on the desert sands. The Eastern superpowers are marching arm in arm, ready to challenge the West. It seems the Western leaders, in...

Last week, the big story was how bankers use HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithmic software not only to rig markets but also to commit theft on a daily basis (Frontrunning, like Quantitative Easing, is just fancy Wall Street lingo to disguise its true meaning of theft). Though many in the public blogosphere expressed shock that stock markets are rigged and that regulators like the Securities Exchange Commission willingly allow this theft to occur, the only thing shocking about this story was how long it took this story to reach the mainstream and that people were crediting Michael Lewis with uncovering...

Last week, St. Louis Fed Director of Research David Andolfatto released a presentation on Bitcoin, becoming one of the most prominent central bank officials to study the cryptocurrency. We caught up with Andolfatto to ask him about why he put this deck together, where he thinks Bitcoin is going, and whether he personally has anything invested in it. Business Insider: What was the genesis for this presentation? David Andolfatto: Its genesis was a blog post I'd started, addressing arguments that gold bugs frequently put forth, that gold is superior money. Of course, Bitcoin was in the news — I read...

The moon is made of far more valuable stuff than green cheese. And one man wants to capitalize on that fact. NASA, which ended America's space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself. Jain's company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon. "People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn't it just barren soil?" Jain told FoxNews.com....

As a child growing up in rural India in the 1960s and 1970s, Naveen Jain would gaze up at the moon and imagine a life beyond his modest surroundings. Today he's still gazing at the moon, but for far different reasons. Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year. This serial entrepreneur-he founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius-believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges. Among...

Japanese Prepare For "Abenomics Failure", Scramble To Buy Physical Gold Tyler Durden 03/28/2014 10:42 -0400 As we reported yesterday, the world's most clueless prime minister, Japan's Shinzo Abe, has suddenly found himself in a "no way out" situation, with inflation for most items suddenly soaring (courtesy of exported deflation slamming Europe), without a matched increase in wages as reflected in the "surprising" tumble in household spending, which dropped 2.5% on expectations of a 0.1% increase in the month ahead of Japan's infamous sales tax hike. How does one explain this unwillingness by the public to buy worthless trinkets and non-durable...

Gold And Silver Go From Bearish To More Bearish Commodities / Gold and Silver 2014 Mar 27, 2014 - 03:16 PM GMT By: P Radomski CFA Commodities Briefly: In our opinion short speculative positions in gold (half), silver (half) and mining stocks (full) are justified from the risk/reward perspective. The decline in the precious metals sector continues, as indicated in the previous alerts. Gold, silver and mining stocks have declined once again and appear to be headed lower also today. Did yesterday’s price action change anything? Let’s take a look (charts courtesy of http://stockcharts.com). Today we will start with silver...

A common argument for dumping the Euro is that it is overvalued, and that the ECB (European Central Bank) is unwilling to correct this so-called “problem.” This overvaluation is regularly cited as being over 10 percent against the dollar. The Swiss central bank surrendered control of its money supply by fixing its currency at 1.2 against the Euro essentially on the notion that its currency was “overvalued.” Advocates of a Euro breakup consider that a country with its own currency can then follow an independent monetary policy ensuring a competitive exchange rate. Never mind that neither the USA nor Great...

Bellando, a former investment bank analyst at JPMorgan, is the son of John Bellando, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at Condé Nast. His brother, John, a top chief investment officer with JPMorgan, works on risk exposure valuations. Several John Bellando emails were cited during testimony at the Senate Finance Committee’s inquiry into the bank’s losses during the infamous London Whale trade fiasco. Kenneth Bellando — who grew up in Rockville Center, LI, and was a Georgetown graduate — worked as a summer analyst at JPMorgan while in school. Upon graduation in 2007, he was hired as an investment...

March. 14 (UPI) -- A Nevada man filed a criminal complaint alleging his niece stole and sold his $50,000 coin collection to reality TV's Pawn Stars, which then melted the gold down. David Walters filed the complaint with the Clark County Justice Court on Nov. 27, and by time police notified the pawn shop on Dec. 5, the gold pieces had already been melted down, Radar Online reported.

DAILY PRICE REPORT Today’s AM fix was USD 1371.00, EUR 982.30 and GBP 821.70 per ounce. Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1355.75, EUR 977.47 and GBP 817.01 per ounce.Gold rose $20.10 or 1.5% yesterday to $1,367.10/oz. Silver surged 47 cents or 2.2% to $21.28/oz.Putin and a Gold BarGold extended gains to a third session today, reaching fresh six month highs as investors hedged geopolitical risks and Chinese economic slowdown fears. Gold hit $1,375.20, its highest since September 10 and has gained 14% so far this year on global geopolitical and macroeconomic risk.A significant bond default in China and a weak...

A Manhattan trader was killed Tuesday morning by a speeding Long Island Rail Road commuter train, marking at least the seventh suicide of a financial professional this year. Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, jumped in front of an LIRR train at 6 a.m. near the Syosset train station. He was declared dead at the scene. Reilly’s identity was confirmed by Salvatore Arena, an LIRR spokesperson, who said an investigation into the incident was continuing. Passengers on the west-bound express train told MTA investigators they saw a man standing by the tracks before he jumped in...

One of our favorite japes is about the group of scientists who figure out the secret to life — a way to make a human being from nothing but dirt. When they’ve worked it all out, they are so excited they go directly to God to announce their discovery that He is no longer necessary. He appears a bit surprised, but they offer to demonstrate. He nods. One of the scientists bends down and scoops up a fistful of dirt. “Oh, no,” God exclaims. “You’ve got to make your own dirt.” This is how we feel about bitcoins. The idea...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Gold climbed for a second session on Wednesday to its highest in 5-1/2 months, as global uncertainty over economic growth and tensions in Ukraine burnished the metal's safe-haven appeal. Weakness in equities and base metals, along with technical buying, propelled gold prices through resistance at $1,355 an ounce, traders said. Other precious metals were higher too, with silver climbing nearly 2 percent. "There is quite a lot of attention on moves in other metal markets, like base metals," said one Hong Kong-based precious metals.

A curious story, and one which should be taken with a mine of salt, has surfaced out of the pro-Russian newspaper Iskra, which reports - so far on an entirely unsubstantiated basis - that last Friday, in a mysterious operation under the cover of night, Ukraine's gold reserves were promptly loaded onboard an unmarked plane, which subsequently took the gold to the US. From the source: Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport. According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane's appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the...

Before Bear Stearns and Lehman collapsed, the market for physical gold was limited to a relatively small group of investors who understood the havoc inflation was wreaking on our savings and the US markets. As the financial crisis took hold, a flood of new and inexperienced buyers entered the market, creating an opportunity for unscrupulous metals dealers to swindle their way to massive profits. This is what drove me to launch my very own gold dealer, Euro Pacific Precious Metals, to provide a safe alternative for those who were taking my advice to diversify into sound money. In our first...

Renewed Indian Demand Driving Gold Prices Higher? Commodities / Gold and Silver 2014 Mar 06, 2014 - 02:04 PM GMTJulian_DW_Phillips Current Situation Since last August, the Indian government placed a stranglehold on gold imports into the country by requiring that 20% of all gold imported be exported as jewellery. This forced the amount of gold imported to drop to 30% of former levels until October of last year. Then the amount imported rose to 38 tonnes a month and has been at that level since then. The amount of gold that was expected to be imported for the year was...

A US couple who unearthed gold coins worth more than $10 million might have to return them as they may have been stolen, a report said. The California couple uncovered eight cans filled with more than 1,400 coins on their property, in what is believed to be the most valuable treasure trove ever discovered in the United States. They took them to a firm specializing in ancient coins, Kagin's Inc, which valued them and announced last week that they will sell them, via online retail giant Amazon.

A California couple who found a stash of buried gold coins valued at $10 million may not be so lucky after all. The coins may have been stolen from the US Mint in 1900 and thus be the property of the government, according to a published report. The San Francisco Chronicle's website reported that a search of the Haithi Trust Digital Library provided by Northern California fishing guide Jack Trout, who is also a historian and collector of rare coins, turned up the news of the theft. The California couple, who have not been identified, spotted the edge of an...

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...

Just before the bankruptcy of the Mt. Gox bitcoin digital-money (or virtual-currency) exchange, Japanese finance minister Taro Aso predicted the inevitable failure. “No one recognizes them as a real currency,” he told reporters. “I expected such a thing to collapse.” I totally agree with Mr. Aso. For weeks and weeks I have been tweeting and broadcasting that bitcoin is not real money. It is not a reliable medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value. It has no central-bank regulation, network operations, or even centralized issuance. And because of its wild price fluctuations, bitcoin can never...

A California couple that discovered $10 million worth of gold coins last year will have to pay nearly half that amount in federal and state income tax, regardless of whether they sell the coins.

A judge has ruled that ten rare gold coins worth roughly $80 million belong to the U.S. government, not the family that possessed them, according to ABC News. In 2003 Joan Langbord and two other family members opened a safety deposit box that belonged to Langbord’s father, Philadelphia coin dealer Israel Switt, and found the valuable collection. When they asked the Philadelphia Mint to authenticate the find, the coins were apparently seized without compensation and taken to Fort Knox. The 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle is “one of the most sought-after rarities in history,” according to Courthouse News. Originally valued at...

A California couple spotted the edge of an old can on a path they had hiked many times before. Poking at the can was the first step in uncovering a buried treasure of rare coins estimated to be worth $10 million. "It was like finding a hot potato," the couple told coin expert Dr. Don Kagan from Kagin's, Inc. The couple hired the president of Kagin's, Inc. and Holabird-Kagin Americana, a western Americana dealer and auctioneer, to represent them. "Since 1981, people have been coming to us with one or two coins they find worth a few thousand dollars,...

LOS ANGELES – A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their Gold Country property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.

The mysterious haul of gold coins discovered by a Northern California couple while out walking their dog – and valued at $10 million – may well be a previously undiscovered bounty that an employee of the San Francisco Mint was convicted of stealing in 1901. The couple, who haven’t been named, stumbled across the haul of 1,427 rare, mint-condition gold coins, nearly all dating from 1847 to 1894, buried in the shadow of an old tree on their Gold Country property in February 2013. The face value of the Saddle Ridge Hoard, as they’ve called it, added up to about...

U.S. Government Reporting Requirements For Coin And Bullion Dealers There is much confusion and disinformation about the extent to which coin dealers are required to obtain customer information to keep on file and use in submitting reports to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or other government agencies. In some cases the confusion may be used to steer customers away from lower-margin bullion sales and towards the higher-margin coin sales, even though such items may be less suitable for the customer's purposes. I'll attempt to summarize some of the reporting topics herein, but for more helpful information, you can visit the...

The London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say. Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University's Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody's Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper. "The structure of the benchmark is...

One couple's gold find could mean a jackpot for the IRS. The Northern California couple that found $10 million worth of rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree on their property will likely owe about half the find's value whether they sell the gold or not. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the find is a taxable event under a 1969 federal court ruling that held a "treasure trove" is taxable the year it was discovered. "If you find and keep property that does not belong to you that has been lost or abandoned (treasure-trove),...

Treasure hunting enthusiasts weigh in on origins of couple's $10 million findThe mysterious haul of gold coins discovered by a Northern California couple while out walking their dog – and valued at $10 million – may well be a previously undiscovered bounty that an employee of the San Francisco Mint was convicted of stealing in 1901. The couple, who haven’t been named, stumbled across the haul of 1,427 rare, mint-condition gold coins, nearly all dating from 1847 to 1894, buried in the shadow of an old tree on their Gold Country property in February 2013. The face value of the...

A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree. Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them. Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to more than $28,000, some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million apiece. [continued at link]

TIBURON (CBS SF) – A couple has made the buried treasure find of a lifetime – gold coins worth millions of dollars – on their property in Northern California. A cache of more than 1,400 rare U.S. gold coins, stored in decaying metal cans and buried near an old tree on the property, was discovered as the couple were taking their dog on a daily walk. The estimated value is believed to be in excess of $10 million and may be the most valuable hoard of gold coins unearthed in North America, according to veteran numismatist Don Kagin. Kagin, president...

<p>A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.</p> <p>Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them. Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to about $27,000, some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million apiece.</p>

In order for our current level of debt-fueled prosperity to continue, the rest of the world must continue to use our dollars to trade with one another and must continue to buy our debt at ridiculously low interest rates. Of course the number one foreign nation that we depend on to participate in our system is China. China accounts for more global trade than anyone else on the planet (including the United States), and most of that trade is conducted in U.S. dollars. This keeps demand for our dollars very high, and it ensures that we can import massive quantities...

Meryl Davis and Charlie White became the first Americans to win the Olympic ice dance title with a sultry, spellbinding performance to Scheherazade at the Sochi Games on Monday. In a showdown with rivals and Canadian training partners Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the American pair proved to be a cut above the rest by winning with a record total of 195.52. Davis and White, who also became just the fourth non-Russian couple to scoop ice dance gold, set record scores in each segment of the competition - following up their 78.89 in the short with 116.63 in the long...

Concerns about high debt and an overvalued currency are sucking gold imports into China, according to a new report from Lombard Street Research. It adds that the authorities may possibly be moving in the direction of using gold in a plan to make the yuan an international currency. China's official reserves of gold stand at 1,054 metric tons, that's worth about $45 billion. This figure has not been updated since 2009 and Lombard says the number may not be accurate because since that last update imports of gold and domestic production amount to over 4,500 metric tons.

China is poised to snag the title of the world's biggest gold buyer, a feat that could support prices of the precious metal as well as accelerate the global bullion market's shift eastward. Gold purchases by Chinese consumers jumped 41% last year to a record, according to data released Monday by the China Gold Association. China has long had a cultural affinity for precious metals, and the increasing affluence of consumers there, along with more relaxed investment restrictions, has boosted the country's demand for gold bars and jewelry alike. The increase was enough to overtake India, which for decades, if...

We thought today's newsflow and "market action" ranked pretty high on the absurd surrealism scale. And then we saw this. BLYTHE MASTERS TO JOIN CFTC GLOBAL MARKETS COMMITTEE JPMORGAN’S BLYTHE MASTERS TO JOIN CFTC ADVISORY COMMITTEE CFTC SPOKESMAN COMMENTS ON BLYTHE MASTERS JOINING COMMITTEE That's right - you read it correct: "Blythe Masters, head of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s commodities division, is joining an advisory committee of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said Steve Adamske, a spokesman for the regulator. Masters, 44, was invited by acting Chairman Mark Wetjen to sit on a global markets committee at the Washington-based...