Free Republic

There’s a gold empire hiding in plain sight. Not in history books. Not in museums. But right now — operating in secret, controlling more wealth than most nations. This is the story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the mysterious institution in Basel, Switzerland, that acts as the central bank of central banks. Created after World War I, it quietly became the world’s most powerful financial entity — managing the hidden gold that backs nations, funds wars, and shapes the global economy. From Nazi gold transactions to Bretton Woods, to modern gold manipulation through paper markets, the BIS...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

Pundits are pooh-poohing the plank in the GOP platform that calls for a commission to examine “possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar,” declaring it a sop to Ron Paul supporters. And indeed this was a motivation of hard-core political calculators around Governor Romney. But these self-styled, world-weary cynical types didn’t put this item in of their own volition. They went along with it because it was pushed hard by Tea Party groups and several U.S. senators and representatives, as well as Ron Paul devotees. A picture from the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of...