Spookier And Spookier...

It has been a long and strange week in the financial markets all over the world:

Gold and Other Precious Metal Prices Plunge

On Friday April 19 and Monday April 22 the price of gold (more accurately: "paper gold") plunged about $120 per ounce, the biggest percentage drop in decades.  This drop represented a paper loss of $720 billion:

6 billion oz of gold in the world * $120 / oz = $720,000,000,000

The other precious metals dropped sharply as well, the price of silver dropped even more on a percentage basis.  Platinum and palladium joined the ride down.

And yet buyers of physical precious metals were out in force all over the world, author included, lined up to buy gold.  I was only able to buy two ounces (total) in two visits to my local coin shop, that's it!  All that was available.  China and India had people lined up in buying frenzies.  Yet the "paper price" went down.

The "premium" (the extra price for a gold coin above the spot price: see the eBay/24hgold.com widget here at the home page: 24hgold.com at the bottom, currently the premium is about 14%, pretty high) on buying gold also went up.  The premium I paid earlier this week was about 7.2% (Gold Eagle) at the coin shop, high for them.

Silver is even harder to get (and with higher premiums).  Most of the popular silver products are not available at all.

Other Developments

-- Stocks had their worst week in five months.
-- The two bombings in Boston caused well over a billion dollars in losses there.
-- The relative media silence on the far deadlier Texas fertilizer plant explosion.


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The CBC of Canada has produced a special show "The Secret World of Gold".  You can watch it here (link is at): jsmineset.com (of April 19, 2013, in three parts).

The CBC report discusses a lot of interesting items:

-- Andrew Maguire's story, he was a precious metals trader in London who has attempted to blow the whistle on Morgan Stanley and their pretty obvious manipulation on silver and gold prices.

-- The American company Odyssey Marine's story of salvaging gold and silver from the Atlantic Ocean, including their losing their find to Spain...

-- The story of how France got their gold out just before the invading Nazis could capture it during World War II.

-- Canadian billionaire Eric Sprott (who runs a lot of gold & silver as well as gold & silver ETFs) as well as Sprott's employee John Embry.

-- Venezuela's taking their gold back.  Apparently when they wanted their 400 and something tonnes, that created a mild panic among the custodians (the UK, Europe and the USA) of their gold...  I wonder if Germany not getting much of THEIR gold over the next several years would be related to that...

-- Doubts among some that the US national gold at Ft. Knox has not been properly audited since 1954...  (Note: performing such an audit that would satisfy skeptics would be cheap and easy to do).


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The Obama Administration failed in its current efforts to advance their gun-grabs.  The Senate effort to adopt the UN treaty on small arms failed as did the effort to impose stricter gun law registration and gun checks.  The Administration and their D-Team allies in Congress want more laws, always more laws.

How about they enforce the ones we have now?

A parallel effort is underway to grant essentially an amnesty to illegal aliens.  It is not being painted this way, but that is the real goal.  Whatever the D-Team gets through now, they will ask for more later.  One of those "Camel's nose under the tent" things...

Again, the laws on illegal immigration are actively and deliberately not being enforced.

The above two efforts are clearly aimed at expanding government power at the expense of the citizens (gun-grabs) and at expanding the voting base of the Democrat Party to insure their dominance in the future.


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It was just this afternoon that we learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the elder Boston Bomber) was apparently an Islamic extremist who went to Russia and Kyrgyzstan in 2010 for six months.  Was he trained by Chechen extremists?  Apparently our government was warned about Tsarnaev, and the FBI questioned him.  We were warned...