Free Republic

Senior officials for the Venezuelan government have reportedly travelled to London for crunch talks with the Bank of England as they seek to repatriate more than $500 million of gold back to Caracas. **SNIP** Venezuela has in recent years been a major seller of gold, and this year alone it has sold about 26 tons, worth close to $900 million, to Turkey. In the past four years, Venezuela's gold reserves have decreased to about 175 tons from about 400 tons, Reuters reported, citing statistics from the country's central bank. Venezuela has been selling its sizeable gold reserves, built up under...

A Polish explorer claims he has found massive underground structure in southwestern Poland that, he says, the Nazis built as a nuclear shelter for Hitler. Speaking on TVN24, Szpakowski said the structure was part of a system of railway tunnels and corridors that the Nazis were building during World War II around the city of Walbrzych. His conference was hosted by Walbrzych regional authorities.

Heavy machinery begins the search, the work of explorers hoping to find a legendary Nazi train laden with treasure and armaments in Walbrzych, Poland, on Tuesday Aug. 16, 2016.

The world has been hearing about the Nazi gold train for weeks, and we may finally be getting closer to a confirmation or denial. The Polish army has converged upon the southwestern Poland site where the train could be located, with explosives, chemical, and radiation experts making sure there's no danger, especially since the train was rumored to have been booby-trapped, the AP reports. "Our goal is to check whether there's any hazardous material," a Polish colonel leading the search tells AFP. The military personnel are using ground-penetrating radar and mine detectors in their probe near Walbrzych, and the governor...

The idea of the United States directly intervening in Venezuela via military force has been off the table from the beginning. (The Trump administration did send someone to take a meeting with some coup plotters at one point, but nothing came of it.) But might there be some other way we could help knock their dictator Nicolas Maduro off his perch and give the people of that nation an opening to take back their government? Maybe. Hitting their oil sales market through sanctions would be ineffective for two reasons. First, too many other nations would refuse to participate, particularly Russia...

https://ukshop.economist.com/products/the-world-in-2017?_ga=1.163472444.1228670650.1479661058  

Close to the end of the year each year going back decades, The Economist magazine puts out an issue in which they take a look at the coming year and 2018 is no exception. As we had reported on ANP back on July 11th of 2017, back in 1988, The Economist put out a story in which the cover photo featured the mythical ‘phoenix’ rising out of the ashes of burning dollar bills and other paper/fiat money, wearing a gold medallion with the year ‘2018’ on it with their title, “Get Ready For A World Currency“. Reporting in their story...

Central banks around the world have upped their spending on gold to the highest level in almost three years, according to the World Gold Council (WGC). More than 148 metric tons of gold were bought by the national banks in the three months to the end of September, a rise of 22 percent on the same period last year. Using the current spot price of $1,223 per troy ounce, the gold purchases by the banks added up to a $5.82 billion spending splurge on the precious metal. Russia’s central bank led the buying, purchasing more than 92 tons of gold....

An Instagram star who teaches other women how to date billionaires has revealed how she's maintained her affluent lifestyle through 'the men she's been with.' Anna Bey, 32 - who also goes by the moniker JetSetBabe - explained how she transformed her looks in order to be accepted into high society, including undergoing a nose job. She said women 'shouldn't be judged' for living off their rich husbands, but added that she wasn't a fan of the word 'gold-digger'. However, the London-based blogger, who is dating a banker, added that she would struggle to be with a man who wasn't...

Russia has continued to get rid of US Treasury bonds as the country's share in American debt is arriving close to zero. Russia was one of the biggest holders of US debt with a $180 billion investment.

An Arizona man who fell to the bottom of an old abandoned gold mine shaft, broke both his legs, fought off a trio of rattlesnakes and went two days without food or water before a friend heard his cries for help is lucky to be alive, said the head of a rescue team. "He is a very fortunate individual," Operations Commander Roger Yensen of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Mountain Rescue Posse said Thursday of 62-year-old John Waddell. Waddell owns the land where the shaft is located north of Phoenix and was using a rope to lower himself into it on...

The wizards of early Europe wore hats of gold intricately embellished with astrological symbols that helped them to predict the movement of the sun and stars... ...Wilfried Menghin, the director of the Berlin Museum... carrying out detailed research on a 3,000-year-old 30in high Bronze Age cone of beaten gold that was discovered in Switzerland in 1995... ...discovered that the 1,739 sun and half-moon symbols decorating the Berlin cone's surface make up a scientific code which corresponds almost exactly to the "Metonic cycle" discovered by the Greek astronomer Meton in 432bc - about 500 years after the cone was made --...

A pair of Pennsylvania treasure hunters and their lawyer are accusing the FBI of playing games and acting suspiciously about a dig at a rural site believed to contain a massive stash of Civil War-era gold -- which may be worth up to $250 million. The accusations from Dennis and Kem Parada, and their attorney, Bill Cluck, came months after the bureau said it dug a hole in Dents Run and found nothing. The father-and-son duo felt convinced that area of state-owned wilderness northeast of Pittsburgh holds a hidden stash of gold and the pair claim the FBI went back...

Gold has gotten a bad rap. Long seen as the investment choice of the cranky and the fearful, the metal yields nothing; as Warren Buffett has said, it just “looks at you.” This year has been especially lackluster for gold. Its price has slumped 8%, to about $1,200 an ounce, and is off more than 35% from its high of $1,900 in 2011. Adding insult to injury, Vanguard will soon rechristen the largest gold-oriented U.S. mutual fund and shift its focus away from the metal. But this out-of-favor asset class now deserves a place in investment portfolios. Compared with stocks...

Under the terms of the deal, each Randgold shareholder will receive 6.1280 new Barrick shares for each share of the African rival, the companies said. Barrick shareholders will own about 66.6 percent of the new Barrick merged company while Randgold shareholders will own about 33.4 percent. Randgold's long-term chief executive Mark Bristow will retain that same role in the new merged company while Barrick's John Thornton will become the executive chairman. "The Boards of Barrick and Randgold believe that the Merger will create an industry-leading gold company with the greatest concentration of Tier One Gold Assets in the industry, the...

Canada's Barrick Gold Corp. is reportedly near an agreement to buy London-listed Randgold Resources Ltd. in a deal that could be worth as much as $18 billion, according to media reports. The agreement could be announced as soon as Monday, according to a report from Reuters citing a person familiar with the talks.

A stash of fifth-century gold coins worth millions has been found buried in a pot under an Italian theatre. Builders demolishing the former Cressoni theatre in Como were stunned to discover the cache last Wednesday. The Roman coins will be examined and dated before ending up in a museum, officials said.

Hundreds of ancient Roman gold coins have been discovered on the site of an old theatre in Como in northern Italy, the Ministry of Culture said. The coins date back to the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and were found in a kind of stone urn in the Cressoni theatre basement, not far from the site of the ancient city of Novum Comum.    According to Italian media, the coins could be worth millions of euros.   "We do not yet know in detail the historical and cultural significance of this discovery but this area is a real...

A shining effigy of controversial Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suddenly appeared in southwestern Germany—to the surprise and chagrin of locals.The 13-foot statue, painted gold, depicts Erdogan with his hand, outstretched and pointing at the horizon. Erdogan is a divisive figure in Germany—which has a diaspora of around 3 million people of Turkish nationality or descent—and when residents of Wiesbaden, 20 miles west of Frankfurt, woke up to a monument honoring the man, they had questions for city officials."We have received calls from a string of irritated citizens—it is not clear to people that it is part of the...

Gold and silver have been getting the snot beaten out of them lately as people respond to a fiat currency crisis in Turkey by flocking to another fiat currency. But even if I were a Keynesian and believed in paper money, I'd have to say that precious metals are looking attractive. I'm generally a gold guy, but silver is crazy cheap right now. As of right now it's trading at around $14.50 oz. But the real story that conventional analysts are missing is the silver to gold price ratio. Since gold was demonetized in the early 1970's the average price...