Free Republic

In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold. The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold. Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr....

The moles want gold! Two nitwit nightcrawlers — including a particularly portly “mole person” — were busted Thursday for diving into a Manhattan manhole in a subterranean quest for precious metals, police and law-enforcement sources said. Cops nabbed Kevin Rodriguez, 26, and Samuel Reveron, 25 – both Venezuelan citizens – near their Queens homes in connection to a surreal pre-dawn Wednesday sewer escapade just steps from the Loews Regency New York on the Upper East Side. The strange shenanigans could end up shedding light on the motivations of mysterious “mole people” spotted popping out of sewers — as Reveron admitted...

Tether Is Trading and Storing Silver in Las Vegas “Physical silver belonging to a Tether affiliate is being stored within Gold.com’s network” Below are two tether stories. The first is about their Gold loan business, which is booming. The second is from our own analysis of Gold.com’s most recent 10k revealing they control and are trading Silver as well. Tether’s $1.5 Billion Gold Loan Business Is No Joke Authored by GoldFix Tether has become a substantial source of financing in the physical gold market, extending approximately $1.5 billion in precious-metals financing to Gold.com, one of the largest bullion dealers in...

An ex-CIA agent who stashed $40 million in gold bars at his Virginia home for “work-related expenses” could land a plea deal with federal prosecutors, according to court documents. David Rush, 49, and the Justice Department have made significant progress toward a “plea agreement in principle,” the feds and Rush’s lawyers wrote in a joint motion Friday in the case — one of the most significant financial crimes in the history of the CIA. Rush was arrested in late May after the feds removed a staggering 303 gold bars that were US government property and worth $40 million in a...

Something interesting is happening inside the plumbing of the global financial system. It was reported yesterday that the Netherlands just shifted approximately 86 tonnes of its gold reserves from New York and Ottawa to London, explicitly citing “increasing geopolitical unrest” and the need to prepare for severe crises. The Dutch central bank says gold held in London can be accessed and traded more quickly during an emergency than gold stored in New York or Canada. That is some wonderfully sanitized central-bank language to deliver a message that seems to me to be “confidence in the U.S. holding the world’s gold…and...

A man accused of being a key player in an international gold theft scheme targeting senior citizens in Tarrant County and across the country was arrested while trying to flee the country, officials say. Muzamil Ahmed, 35, was detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, according to the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office. Port Authority police arrested him on Tarrant County warrants alleging organized crime for theft, financial abuse of the elderly, and money laundering. Investigators say Ahmed operated out of New Jersey, where he created shell corporations to launder money stolen from elderly victims. Authorities said...

For over two decades, Venezuela has served as a critical outpost for Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere, with reports detailing the group's entrenchment on Margarita Island and ties to the former regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations describe this presence as evolving from fundraising networks among the Lebanese diaspora in the 1980s to sophisticated operations involving training, smuggling, and financial schemes by the 2000s. Margarita Island, once a bustling tourist spot, has been highlighted as a primary hub, surpassing even the Tri-Border Area in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay for Hezbollah's regional activities. Training...

Confirmed Royal Jet flights from Abu Dhabi into Iran have intensified scrutiny of unverified claims that the United Arab Emirates released billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, including gold, to reduce its exposure to future Iranian attacks. The allegations, attributed exclusively to anonymous senior sources in Tehran, describe financial transfers designed to preserve an apparent pause in Iranian missile and drone strikes against Emirati territory during the wider 2026 United States-Iran confrontation. Flight-tracking data confirms that a Royal Jet Boeing 737-7KK Business Jet, registered A6-RJA, conducted short return flights from Abu Dhabi to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and Karaj’s Payam...

Over the past eighteen months, nearly every condition analysts have long said would erode the dollar's dominance arrived at once. War broke out in the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz has closed, reopened, and closed again, and remains shut as this is written. Iran began charging transit tolls denominated in yuan. Indian refiners started settling Russian crude in yuan and dirhams, the first time a top-five oil importer structurally routed around the dollar for energy. China's cross-border payment system posted record volumes, clearing 1.22 trillion yuan in a single day in March. Central banks bought gold at a pace...

GFN – BEIJING: China imported about 173 tonnes of gold in June, the highest monthly total since March 2024 and the third straight monthly increase, according to Bloomberg and Chinese customs data. Ironically or not, this is after the western media has been pulling its hair out, saying that China has made retail purchases of gold illegal due to its deleveraging of trading on the SGE. The June increase pushed China’s gold imports for the first half of 2026 to roughly 820 tonnes. That was nearly double the total from a year earlier and the second-highest first-half figure on record,...

A former CIA officer in Virginia is accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars in gold bars and foreign currency from the very agency he worked for, according to an FBI affidavit and a source familiar with the matter. David Rush was arrested last week in Virginia on one charge of theft of public money. He has not yet entered a plea and remains behind bars pending a detention hearing in the case. The FBI alleges Rush became a senior executive government employee with top-secret clearance by lying repeatedly on applications about his military service and education, falsely saying...

Q: Have you visited Fort Knox? BESSENT: I am happy to say, all gold is present and accounted for! The US has the LARGEST pile of gold in the world, over $1 trillion.

The Number You Need To Understand First Before we start, one number puts everything in context. Fort Knox contains 147,341,858 fine troy ounces of gold. At current market prices near $4,000 per ounce, these reserves represent around $600 billion. But at the legal book value of $42.22 per ounce, fixed since 1973, the assets are officially valued at only $6.22 billion on the Treasury’s books. America owns $667 billion worth of gold. But it is recorded on the books at $6 billion. That $660 billion gap is the thread that connects everything that follows. January 2025: The Audit That Was...

This video explores the spectacular remains of the Roman mines at Las Médulas, Spain. The Roman Gold Mine that Ate Mountains | 9:09 toldinstone | 21,693 views | July 10, 2026

Precious metals investors saw their holdings skyrocket in value in 2024 and 2025, which was great news for them, but bad news for some dealers, such as Rosland Capital LLC. Rosland Capital filed for a Chapter 11 liquidation facing distress from declining profitability compounded by an unsustainable order fulfillment model amid record precious metals prices.

Central bank gold statistics: Central banks remain committed to gold PDF 0.24 mb Central banks were back in buying mode in May – and with a little more spring in their step. Based on the latest reported data, official gold reserves increased by a net 41t during the month, with purchases once again concentrated among a familiar cast of buyers (Chart 1). Much of the activity was driven by Poland (18t) and China (10t), with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan also continuing their monthly net gold buying activity. Singapore also rejoined the list of buyers, reporting a net purchase of 4t, its...

Russia is now "so deeply invested in the Maduro regime that the only realistic option is to double down." Financial Times' Alexander Gabuev says that Rosneft owns two offshore gas fields in Venezuela and holds stakes in assets boasting more than 20 million tonnes of crude. Caracas owes Rosneft USD 3 billion. Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido last month declared himself interim president, winning the backing of the United States. Russia, meanwhile, supported Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, who has led the oil-rich nation since 2013. The Kremlin is extending help to Maduro while the United States is imposing sanctions...

Costa Rica’s illegal gold mining problem is no longer confined to the long-running Crucitas debate, the Colegio de Geólogos de Costa Rica warned, calling for a national strategy to track gold, strengthen state controls and respond differently to each mining region. The professional association said the country needs a technical plan for gold mining that goes beyond emergency police operations and political arguments over whether to reopen large-scale extraction. Its proposal centers on traceability, tighter regulation of processing plants, stronger oversight by the Dirección de Geología y Minas, and formalization in communities where mining is already a source of family...

The battle over what counts as money — and who gets to control it — just took a dramatic turn. China’s biggest banks are shutting down retail paper gold trading just as gold has pulled back sharply from record highs, signaling that the fight over gold is no longer only about price. It is about market structure, settlement power, and the future of money itself. In June, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China IDCBF -7.31% ▼ , one of the largest banks in the world, said it would stop offering intermediary services for individual precious-metals trading linked to the Shanghai...

There is an increasing amount of chatter regarding a surge in open interest for deeply out-of-the-money options on COMEX gold. Whether or not there's anything substantial behind these speculative trades remains to be seen. COMEX Gold Options Open Interest And Market Speculation Let's start with what we know. Below is a screenshot from the CME website that shows total open interest in call options on Dec26 COMEX gold. As I type, that contract is trading at about $4100, but as you can see, there are a substantial number of open call options from $10,000 to $20,000. For these to be...