Free Republic

Tyler Durden 06/06/2014 Two years ago, stories of fake tungsten-filled gold coins and bars began to spread; it appears, between the shortage of physical gold (after Asian central bank buying) and the increase in smuggling (courtesy of India's controls among others) that gold fraud is back on the rise. As SCMP reports, a mainland China businessman, Zhao Jingjun, discovered that HK$270 million of 998kg of gold bars he bought in Ghana had been swapped for non-precious metal bars. What is perhaps even more worrisome, given the probe into commodity-financing deals and the rehypothecation evaporation; these gold bars were shipped to...

On Tuesday morning, a plane owned in trust by the Bank of Utah showed up in a very visible area of the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What was it doing there exactly? Nobody knows, reports The New York Times. Under President Barack Obama, the United States has eased some of the long-standing punitive economic sanctions against Iran. Still, very little American — or European — economic activity is allowed inside the religious theocracy. The Bank of Utah is certainly no Wells Fargo. The Ogden-based community bank has all of 13 branches including...