Free Republic

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...

Is Anyone Really Surprised That The System Is On The Brink Again? Phoenix Capital ResearchZero Hedge 02/04/2014 15:07 -0500 We find it truly extraordinary that anyone is surprised the financial system is under duress again. After all, what have the Central Banks accomplished in the last five years? 1) Did they clear out the bad debts that caused the 2008 collapse? NOPE 2) Did they implement structural reforms to insure another 2008 didn’t happen? NOPE 3) Did they punish fraud or corruption in any way to insure that the system was clean? NOPE So what did they do? They cut...

JP Morgan Holds Highest Amount Of Physical Silver In History Commodities / Gold and Silver 2014 Feb 05, 2014 - 06:48 AM GMTBy: GoldSilverWorlds Commodities While everyone is focused on the massive outflows in COMEX registered gold inventories and the gold ETF, GLD, it seems that an important evolution in silver is passing unnoticed. In what follows, Ted Butler, precious metals analyst specialized in COT analysis, reveals a remarkable insight in the physical silver market. Butler’s calculations show that JPMorgan (JPM) has piled up the largest holding of physical silver in modern world. Since the silver price peak in May...

Paul Singer is the manager of the $23 billion Elliott Management hedge fund. In a recent letter to investors in the fund, he expressed bearish sentiments on bitcoin, while remaining bullish on gold despite its recent fall in price. Wrote Singer: There is no more reason to believe that bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although bitcoin is newer and we always look at babies with hope. If you want an alternative currency, check out gold. It has stood the test of thousands of years as a store of...

Stocks were battered on Monday, with investors fleeing equities after factory data cast a negative light on the economy. Article Link: Stocks unravel after factory report

I spend a lot of time browsing FR, and have noticed a lot of FReepers have a lot of knowledge/opinions pertaining to finances. There also appears to be a good number of Freepers who are about retirement age with a good conservative viewpoint. Taking into consideration current events and the steady devaluation of the dollar, my question to the experienced Freepers out there is this: Let's say you're 25, are debt free, make no car payments, earn O-2 pay and are unmarried. You don't have any retirement accounts but are apprehensive of starting an IRA or contributing to a Thrift...

This is a very educational show put on by Kin Greenhouse of "It's Rainmaking Time". She is one of the very few who eschew the soundbite driven media economy and chooses the long format, deep dive approach. While it may be too long for ADD crowd, it digs deep into a not so simple subject to foster understanding and comprehension. This was a pretty good show with an interesting cast of guests:

2014 brought a role reversal of sorts for gold and equities, with the metal higher and stocks lower, in contrast to last year’s performance. With January drawing to a close, can gold hold its gains and will equities continue to fall? Technical charts may offer some clues, analysts said. As of 1:20 p.m. EST, gold for April delivery was $18.60 lower to $1,243.60 per ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange “Gold is returning to its historic role as a safe haven as we’re seen problems globally,” said Darin Newsom, senior analyst at Telvent DTN. “Equities...

Last week, as many of gold investors may already know, we saw the largest one-day withdrawal in over a year as the JPMorgan (JPM) warehouse withdrew a stunning 321,500 ounces of gold (10 tonnes). Additionally, we also saw a large withdrawal from the Scotia Mocatta warehouse, which brings the total withdrawal for the week to almost 5% of all COMEX gold stocks. .... As investors can see, last week's action finally saw a rise in registered gold by a small 5,002 ounces. But that was paired with a huge 350,968 ounce withdrawal from eligible gold stocks - the vast majority...

Curious why over the past few months JPM has quietly been accumulating a substantial amount of eligible physical gold (even as its registered gold inventory is the lowest it has ever been at just 87K ounces since December 13, 2013 when 147K ounces of gold was withdrawn - keep that date in mind for a few minutes)? This may have something to do with it: moments ago the daily Comex gold vault report confirmed what many expected, namely that the JPM accumulation was merely in advance anticipation of major withdrawals. How major? Well, on January 23, JPM saw 321,500...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures advanced on Thursday, snapping a two-day skid with investors mulling the prospects for higher gold demand out of India as a drop in U.S. equities and a weaker dollar helped position prices for their highest close in more than two months. Gold for February delivery GCG4 +1.89% jumped $22.70, or 1.8%, to $1,261.30 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices were poised to close at their highest level since the second half of November, according to FactSet data tracking the most-active contracts.

The assumption by global depositors who have entrusted their national savings with the Federal Reserve and US Government has always been that when they request to repatriate their holdings the Fed would simply open the vault, access said assets and ship them back to where they belong. That’s exactly what Germany expected would happen last year when the country requested that the Federal Reserve return about one-fifth of their gold reserves. But that’s when things got really dicey. The Fed announced that Germany’s gold would be returned… but it would take seven years to get back home.

>A number of readers and bloggers have recently suggested there must be collusion between America and China over the transfer of physical gold from Western capital markets. They assume that governments know what they are doing, so there is a bigger game afoot of which we are unaware.The truth is that China and Western capital markets view gold very differently. You will hardly find anyone in the London Bullion Market who regards gold as money; and for them if gold is no longer money Chinese demand for it is not a monetary issue. Instead it threatens the bullion banks’ business...

The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused...

Gold bugs, rejoice. After taking a pounding last year, gold looks set for a big rally, although chart watchers say it still needs a little push higher before it takes off. A gain of about 1.5% from current levels would take gold above a key chart level, which could spark a further rally of 13% to the August highs, technicians say, and possibly much higher. After tumbling 28% in 2013, gold futures have gained 4% so far this year. On Friday, futures were up 0.9% at $1,251.60 an ounce in recent trading, and were trading above the widely-followed 50-day moving...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it...

China National Gold Group Corporation General Manager Sun Zhaoxue has come out and told the world media that the US is suppressing the gold price. The reason for America’s manipulation of gold is to ensure US Dollar dominance on the world stage. America has by default ended up with the world’s reserve currency and therefore gets the world to work for them in exchange for an ever increasing supply of printed greenbacks. He also went on with an excellent analysis of America’s war against Europe and the Euro using their investment banks. Another good insight from Sun Zhaoxue is that...

There's gold in them leaves! They say money doesn't grow on trees, but gold and other precious metals can accumulate in plants. Researchers recently discovered relatively high levels of gold in the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia, before uncovering a deposit of the metal more than 100 feet beneath it. “Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist. Perhaps surprisingly, it's...

Where is Germany’s Gold? The impact of Germany’s repatriation on the US dollar revolves around an unanswered question: why will it take seven years to complete the transfer? The popular explanation is that the Fed has already rehypothecated all of its gold holdings in the name of other countries. That is, the same mound of bullion is earmarked as collateral for a host of different lenders. Since the Fed depends on a fractional-reserve banking system for its very existence, it would not come as a surprise that it has become a fractional-reserve bank itself. If so, then perhaps Germany politely...

foreward by JS Kim, Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU Here is a recent correspondence from our friend Lars Schall, an independent financial journalist, and the German Central Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, regarding the exact whereabouts and specifications of Germany’s national gold reserve. From the correspondence below, it appears that the US Central Bank had already leased out Germany’s gold reserves in prior years and no longer has it, as the gold bars the US Central Bankers returned to Germany last year were clearly not the same ones that Germany originally deposited with them. The questions Mr. Schall’s revelations now beg is...

A few years back, at the end of 2009, I was approached on two separate occasions by people claiming to be “representatives” of a digital alternative currency format. I was, of course, intrigued by the initial proposal, being that I had been writing for some time on the concept of non-participation as a way to insulate average Americans from the dangers of our unstable fiat driven mainstream economy. Before that, I had already dealt with just about every currency alternative one could imagine; from paper scripts backed by goods, to scripts backed by time or labor, to gold and silver...

The Day the Dollar Dies America’s financial Pearl Harbor is coming December 6, 2015, 3 p.m. HKT, Hong Kong Twenty-one men representing China’s most powerful institutions file into a conference room atop the ICC Tower looming over Victoria Harbor. The Politburo Standing Committee has mustered the CEOs of China’s four largest banks, Sinopec, and several other state-owned multinationals, plus officers from the Central Military Commission and a pair of academics from China’s top technology universities. The general secretary formally opens the meeting.“As you know, the United States of America continues to manipulate its currency,” he begins. “It is devaluing...

Ever since President Nixon broke the US dollar's last link to gold, the world has been set adrift on a sea of fiat currencies that have been increasingly debased, serving the interests of governments and financial elites. For the last five years, central banks have imposed near-zero rates of interest that have helped push up stock, bond, and real estate prices, but have made it nearly impossible for savers to receive meaningful returns on bank deposits. To make matters worse, the apparatus of national security has turned financial transactions into a massive exercise in government surveillance. Under the camouflage of...

Gold had a tumultuous run in 2013 but don't expect any respite in the new year, said UBS, which anticipates double-digit percentage losses over the next 12 months. "For investors who have gold, it's just going to be an awful year again," said Dominic Schnider, head of non-traditional asset classes at UBS Wealth Management, who sees the precious metal falling to $1,050 an ounce this year, 13 percent below current levels. "People have been talking about [the Federal Reserve's] taper, but I would really think about rate hikes. If you make a 12-month forecast you need to look into 2015...

Gold's loss of luster in 2013 solidified Tuesday as the precious metal settled 28 percent lower for the year at $1,202.30 an ounce, its worst annual fall since 1981, after investors spent 2013 moving their money into equities. And 2014 is not shaping up to be a landmark year for the metal, according to market watchers. "It's going down further," Nick Hungerford, chief executive and founder of investment management company Nutmeg, told CNBC Tuesday.

Ever since President Nixon broke the US dollar's last link to gold, the world has been set adrift on a sea of fiat currencies that have been increasingly debased, serving the interests of governments and financial elites. For the last five years, central banks have imposed near-zero rates of interest that have helped push up stock, bond, and real estate prices, but have made it nearly impossible for savers to receive meaningful returns on bank deposits. To make matters worse, the apparatus of national security has turned financial transactions into a massive exercise in government surveillance. Under the camouflage of...

FORTUNE -- Overstock.com, which sells everything from bedding to dinnerware online, recently announced it would accept bitcoin as early as June, making it the first U.S. retailer to use the virtual currency. Still in its experimental phase, bitcoin has fluctuated from as low as $13 in January to more than $1,200 in December. And while it has had a wild ride, Overstock's (OSTK) plans to accept bitcoin as payment shouldn't be read as another bet that the currency will soar higher, says CEO Patrick Byrne.

Bitcoin is the name of a group of peer-to-peer payment networks that serve as an open-source form of digital currency that was originally introduced in 2009 by a software developer with the alias of 'Satoshi Nakamoto." Bitcoin currency is created as rewards to "miners" for providing the computing power to solve difficult math problems to maintain the "blockchain" of internet transactions in the currency. Unlike online credit cards and PayPal systems that allow buyers to claim their money back, bitcoin permanently transfers value. The bitcoin cyber-economy compassed of merchants, users, service providers, and startup enterprises has flourished for the past...