Free Republic

LONDON (Reuters) - Gold pushed above $1,800 an ounce on Wednesday for the first time since 2011, with analysts expecting further gains as investors stock up on an asset they expect to hold its value while the coronavirus convulses the global economy. Spot gold prices have surged 40% in the last 14 months and are within striking distance of 2011's record high of $1,920.30 an ounce. "We'll be challenging the $2,000 level by the end of the year," said Ross Norman, an independent analyst. "We are in a bull market for gold." (Graphic: Gold's latest rally, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/jznpnzmokpl/GR%20RALLY.JPG) Powering the rally...

Swiss refiners — chief among them Valcambi — are under scrutiny due to the high risk of conflict gold originating in Africa entering their supply chain via the United Arab Emirates. Two parallel NGO reports on the subject were published on Thursday. This content was published on July 16, 2020 - 18:00 July 16, 2020 - 18:00 Dominique Soguel-dit-Picard See in another language: 1 One of the reports, Golden Detour [Détour Dorée] by Bern-based Swissaid, examines the gold trade in the UAE, with a focus on the scandal-stricken Dubai company Kaloti Precious Metals and its ties to Valcambi, a precious...

Money supply has a mixed history. Originally, wealth was measured in precious metals of gold, silver, or copper. Exodus 25:3 "And this is the offering which ye shall take of them; gold, and silver, and copper." Items of gold, silver, or copper had to be weighed. A "shekel" was a fixed unit of weight. Shekels were placed on one side of a scale and on the other side were placed the items of gold, silver, or copper to be weighed. The Bible admonished not cheat, Deuteronomy 25:13 "Do not have two differing weights in your bag -- one heavy, one...

It makes sense that the federal government is stepping in to provide financial relief to the millions of citizens facing economic ruin due to the coronavirus crisis and subsequent government restrictions on activity. But what’s unconscionable is the fact that, thanks to the way Congress spent the last decade ignoring any sense of fiscal responsibility, coronavirus relief must come at the cost of further indebting future generations and dimming the outlook of our financial future. It’s not the $2 trillion price tag on the coronavirus relief bill, passed Wednesday evening by the Senate, that does this in and of itself....

The decade that just ended saw a period of uninterrupted economic growth. In the decade to come, we'll pay for squandering it. Since the so-called Great Recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States has enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth. That's the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25...

A bill filed in advance of the next legislative session would make gold and silver legal tender again in the state of South Carolina. State Representative Stewart O. Jones submitted legislation that would restore gold and silver to their status as legal tender in his state. In an op-ed written in October, Representative Jones set out the sound economic principles that support his proposed statute: To understand the full extent of the debt and the destruction of the dollar, it’s essential to realize that paper money has a history of being printed as bills of credit to finance runaway government....

COLUMBIA, S.C. (Nov. 22, 2019) – A bill prefiled in the South Carolina House would make gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. Passage of this bill would take a step toward creating currency competition in South Carolina and undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money. Rep. Stewart Jones filed House Bill 4678 (H.4678) on Nov. 20. Under the proposed law, “gold and silver coins minted foreign or domestic shall be legal tender in the State of South Carolina under the laws of this State. No person or other entity may compel another person or other entity to...

America needs a bold agenda to solidify the current economic expansion and return hard-earned money to taxpayers. That runs counter to the consensus of those on the left, who want large increases in federal spending and dramatic tax increases to pay for them. Their plans are so expansive that it will require both middle-class payroll tax hikes and broad new taxes on American savers, investors, and employers. Opposing that growth-killing agenda isn’t enough. Conservatives need to draw a stark contrast and push for a second round of tax relief that will let workers keep more of their money, make it...

Google’s announcement that it has achieved “quantum supremacy” with a 53-qubit quantum computer greases the skids for all cryptocurrency and military secrets protected by cryptography to be breakable in a stunning new development that will change the world. The Big Tech corporation’s new quantum processor took a mere 200 seconds to complete a computing task that would normally require 10,000 years on a supercomputer. The 53-qubit quantum computer can break any 53-bit cryptography in seconds, meaning Bitcoin’s 256-bit encryption is vulnerable once Google scales its quantum computing to 256 qubits, something their own scientists say will be possible by 2022....

According to a report in the Financial Times, a team of researchers from Google led by John Martinis have demonstrated quantum supremacy for the first time. This is the point at which a quantum computer is shown to be capable of performing a task that’s beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer. The claim appeared in a paper that was posted on a NASA website, but the publication was then taken down. Google did not respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.

Google researchers have reportedly achieved “quantum supremacy” The news: According to a report in the Financial Times, a team of researchers from Google led by John Martinis have demonstrated quantum supremacy for the first time. This is the point at which a quantum computer is shown to be capable of performing a task that’s beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer. The claim appeared in a paper that was posted on a NASA website, but the publication was then taken down. Google did not respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.Why NASA? Google struck...

Three years ago today, the IMF added China’s yuan to the basket of currencies underpinning its Special Drawing Rights (SDR)—its proprietary reserve accounting unit and means of extending credit to countries in need. At the time, the IMF touted it as “an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system.” Many investors took a less benign view, seeing the IMF’s move as threatening to end the dollar’s status as the world’s leading reserve currency—sending interest rates spiking and rendering US debt unaffordable. That was always a false fear, in our view, as the...

President Trump has harshly criticized the Federal Reserve in recent weeks for inching up the standard interest rate to guard against rising inflation and threatening the four percent economic growth rate the billionaire likes to brag about. Here’s another reason: The higher interest rates on your credit card balances and car loans also apply to the federal government’s borrowing. RECOMMENDED

Russia Derangement Syndrome: Syria Edition by David Archibald 6 August 2018 The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So it has been with US involvement in Syria. To provide a context to that involvement, let’s start part way through the story with the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable vendor on December 17, 2011, driven to despair by harassment from petty officials. That spark set off the Arab Spring. A number of Arab regimes changed; some remained resilient. That wasn’t good enough for David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy, the then leaders of the UK and France respectively. Their armed...

The “Resistance” has morphed into the “Lynch Mob.” Having successfully been gaslit into believing Donald Trump is everything from a bad joke to a Russian spy, the Progressive left in the U.S. are embracing all the totalitarian impulses their grabby little hands can find as they climb the Cliffs of their Insanity to remove him from office. This putsch is orchestrated by a now open conspiracy of members of FBI, CIA, MI-6, DNC, the U.S. corporate media and Trump’s own staff in the Oval Office as evidenced by the recent and infamous New York Times op-ed. This expose from a...

CARACAS, July 18 (Reuters) - Venezuela’s central bank this year began refining gold in Turkey following a wave of international sanctions that have left it unwilling to carry out such operations in Switzerland, the country’s mining minister said on Wednesday. The central bank for several years has been buying gold from small miners in the south of the country and refining it to be used as monetary gold to shore up its international reserves that have tumbled as the country’s socialist economy implodes. “This is an agreement established with Turkey and the Venezuelan central bank,” said Victor Cano in a...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Tuesday that countries facing sanctions like Iran, Turkey and Russia may start doing business in their national currencies, suggesting that the days of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency may be numbered. Perhaps no one would be happier about that than President Donald Trump. Here’s why: As Yale economist Robert Tiffin explained in the 1950s, if a country’s currency is the international reserve currency, then it has no choice but to run a current account deficit. If a replacement is found, as the dollar replaced the British pound in the 1920s, it...

Article IV, Section 3 of our Constitution provides that "The Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." A Republican-run state might buy up a few square miles of unoccupied land and sell it and the state sovereignty over it to the federal government. The federal government might then sell it off to a state-authorized private party who promises to create a new republic on it with: 1. limits on taxation/governmental fees/fines/licensing, and 2. no foreign military force, and 3. no governmental...

Martketwatch -- (and now, for a contrarian column) -- More and more investors believe there is a free lunch. That is, you get something for nothing. In investing, people have been getting a free lunch: Stocks (and bonds) have been rising for years without a bad turnout. Will there ever be consequences of massive money printing by central banks, $20 trillion in national debt, a high trade deficit, underfunded social-program liabilities and higher deficits resulting from tax reform? One would think so. In theory, gold is supposed to be a hedge against the supposed free lunch investors are enjoying. In...

The late great Murray Rothbard gave a series of lectures in 1986 at New York Polytechnic University entitled "The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire: 1870 to World War II." Fortunately, somebody recorded them. Lecture 2: The Railroading of the American People.