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Platinum and palladium prices are dropping sharply on signs that South African mining companies are close to reaching a labor agreement that would end a four-month strike. Platinum fell $28, or 2 percent, to close at $1,400.70 an ounce. Palladium lost $29.30, or 3.6 percent, to $777.80 an ounce. …

Searching for a pot of gold? Try the center of the Earth. More than 99 percent of Earth's gold is missing—it all sank to the center of the planet billions of years ago. In fact, says geologist Bernard Wood of Macquarie University in Australia, there's enough gold in Earth's core to coat its surface in 1.5 feet of the stuff. How did it get there? Earth formed from a series of smaller planetesimals that crashed together over the course of 30 million to 40 million years. Wood deduced how much gold ought to be present in Earth's crust by comparing...

The moon is made of far more valuable stuff than green cheese. And one man wants to capitalize on that fact. NASA, which ended America's space shuttle program in June, says it wants to privatize spaceflight. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., wants to go a step further: He wants to privatize the moon itself. Jain's company plans to piggyback on private shuttle flights, using them to carry his lunar landers and mining platforms to the moon. "People ask, why do we want to go back to the moon? Isn't it just barren soil?" Jain told FoxNews.com....

As a child growing up in rural India in the 1960s and 1970s, Naveen Jain would gaze up at the moon and imagine a life beyond his modest surroundings. Today he's still gazing at the moon, but for far different reasons. Jain, 55, is co-founder of Moon Express, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year. This serial entrepreneur-he founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius-believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges. Among...

The platinum nanoframes have 22 times the sepcific catalytic activity of standard electrodes © Science/AAASUS scientists have created an exceptional fuel cell catalyst that contains far less platinum – conventional catalysts need 36 times more platinum to hit the same levels of activity. The manufacturing process, which was discovered by accident, uses simple techniques that the researchers believe can be easily scaled-up. The work could help to make fuel cells economically viable for applications such as cars as the precious metal makes up much of the cost of the cell.Fuel cells react hydrogen with oxygen to produce water, using the...

Wow, look what I noticed today? The European fiscal crisis must have triggered this.. Gold: $1,478/oz Silver: $25.95/oz. Platinum: $1,491.00/oz.

If Barack Obama can "solve" the debt ceiling crisis by printing up some trillion dollar coins, then why does the federal government need our money? As another debt ceiling showdown approaches, many in the liberal media are suggesting that if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling that Obama should just have the U.S. Treasury create a trillion dollar platinum coin and use it to pay our bills. It sounds crazy, but many notable voices (including Paul Krugman of the New York Times) are supporting this idea. But if the federal government has had the power to create trillion...

Far be it for me to argue with a Nobel prizewinning economist, members of Congress and however many thousands have signed the White House petition to mint it, but this whole idea of a trillion dollar platinum coin is ludicrous.

Jodie Miller of NewsBusted has a great clip where she points out that it costs 2 cents to produce 1 cent. And by government standards, that’s a bargain. This brings me to the inane calls for manufacturing trillion dollar coins made of platinum. As I have discussed before, this would send a signal of fear throughout the world that the USA has no intention of cutting spending, lowering its trillion dollar plus debt and escalating its $16 trillion debt. But for the sake of discussion, platinum is currently trading at $1,560 an ounce. In order to produce a trillion dollar...

Welcome to Zimbabwe.  This is not a parody -- it is an actual report from the Washington Post:   Some economists and legal scholars have suggested that the “platinum coin option” is one way to defuse a crisis if Congress can’t or won’t lift the debt ceiling soon. At least in theory. The U.S. government is, after all, facing a real problem. The Treasury Department will hit its $16.4 trillion borrowing limit by next February at the latest. Unless Congress reaches an agreement to raise that borrowing limit, the government will no longer be able to borrow enough money...

The Washington Post had interesting article about solving the debt ceiling “crisis.” The author recommended that Treasury produce two-one trillion dollar platinum coins and deposit them at The Fed. “I like it,” says Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There’s nothing that’s obviously economically problematic about it.” Actually, Mr. Gagnon, there are a few problems with it. 1. Moral hazard. The President orders trillion dollar coins to be produced, then gives one each to campaign donors and other party favorites (note that I did not mention our current President by name since this would be a temptation...

The Washington Post had interesting article about solving the debt ceiling “crisis.” The author recommended that Treasury produce two-one trillion dollar platinum coins and deposit them at The Fed. “I like it,” says Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There’s nothing that’s obviously economically problematic about it.” Actually, Mr. Gagnon, there are a few problems with it. 1. Moral hazard. The President orders trillion dollar coins to be produced, then gives one each to campaign donors and other party favorites (note that I did not mention our current President by name since this would be a temptation...

Isn't it exciting that Planetary Resources is going to jet off and mine the asteroids? This is every teenage sci-fi geek's dream, that everything we imbibed from Verne through Heinlein to Pournelle is going to come true! But there's always someone, isn't there, someone like me, ready to spoil the party. The bit that I cannot get my head around is the economics of it: specifically, the economics of the mining itself. In terms of the basic processing of what they want to do I can't see a problem at all, just as all those authors those years ago could...

<p>JOHANNESBURG — Frantic wives searched for missing loved ones, President Jacob Zuma rushed home from a regional summit and some miners vowed a fight to the death Friday as police finally announced the toll from the previous day's shooting by officers of striking platinum miners: 34 dead and 78 wounded.</p>

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- A treasure hunter said Wednesday he has located the wreck of a British merchant ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Cod during World War II while carrying what he claims was a load of platinum bars now worth more than $3 billion. If the claim proves true, it could be one of the richest sunken treasures ever discovered. But an attorney for the British government expressed doubt the vessel was carrying platinum. And if it was, in fact, laden with precious metals, who owns the hoard could become a matter of international...

Sub Sea Research LLC, a Portland Maine based company located the worlds richest shipwreck, a WWII British Freighter carrying a secret cargo of 71 tons of Platinum sunk by a German U-Boat off the coast of Cape Cod. Sub Sea Research (SSR) spent months searching for the elusive ship, the Port Nicholson, torpedoed by German U-boat U87, June 1942. It took two torpedoes and about 7 hours to sink her. U-87 also fired at the troop ship the “Cherokee,” quickly sinking her with a heavy loss of lives. The Port Nicholson is a steel-hulled, 481 ft. merchant ship, coal fired...

For the second year in a row, the United States Mint did not offer platinum bullion coins for precious metals investors. Bullion products available from the US Mint during 2010 included only gold and silver coins. The American Platinum Eagle was last available to the US Mint's network of authorized purchasers in November 2008 when the last 800 one-half ounce coins available had been sold. Immediately following the sell out, the Mint announced the delayed launch of 2009-dated bullion coins, including the Platinum Eagles. Since that time, Platinum Eagle bullion coins have not been available in any format. When the...

Reports showing a stronger U.S. economy pressured precious metals prices lower Thursday, though silver and palladium prices set multiyear highs earlier in the session. The most actively traded gold futures, for February delivery, settled down $7.60, or 0.5%, at $1,405.90 per troy ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The thinly traded January-delivery contract settled at $1,405.60 per troy ounce, down $7.50, or 0.5%, on the day. Despite settling in negative territory, gold prices remain above the psychologically important $1,400 mark as investors prepare for the final trading day of the year Friday. "There is not...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Gold futures advanced to a record Tuesday as investors sought out an alternative to currencies amid lingering fears of a worldwide slide into recession. Gold for August delivery, the most active contract, rose $4.80, or 0.4%, to settle at $1,245.60 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest price since gold futures started trading in the 1970s. That supplanted the previous record of $1,243.10 reached May 12.

Weiss Research Natural Resources Analyst Sean Brodrick expects the bull market for precious metals to run for "quite some time," with gold hitting $1,450 /oz. by year-end and silver at $25 not long after. In this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Sean sees silver reasserting itself as a monetary, investment and industrial metal. South of the border, some of the Mexican miners have an "embarrassment of riches"-which have largely escaped the attention of Wall Street. The Gold Report: You recently remarked that we're "trillions of dollars in debt and we can't seem to grow our way out of it,"...