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The Secret World Of Gold
In a wide-ranging look at the history and present of the barbarous relic, CBC's Brian McKenna and Ann-Marie MacDonald have gathered many perspectives (pro and con) on gold. The following documentary moves from historical shipwrecks to Nazi 'death gold' and England's war chest to recent years where widespread economic uncertainty has given the yellow metal a "new lustre in the world of high finance." Valued for its permanence, beauty and scarcity, people will lie, cheat, steal and kill in the name of gold; and the clip provides color on many of the market manipulations of the last few years. As MacDonald says, whether it’s a few gold coins or gold bars stored in one of the many vaults around the world, many investors are taking a shine to gold. But there’s not a lot of it. It is said that, even melted down, there would not be enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool. Some claim that much of the gold held by the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox is gone - that for every 100 ounces of gold traded, there exists only one ounce of real, physical gold. So, where is the gold - and who really owns it?
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PUD: to get at that ore, many more tons of earth have to be moved, then left as waste.
If you push that earth here, it's "dirt". If you leave it there, then it's "waste".
Life is too short to listen to your sludge.
LOL, so true. Judging by your response, you probably have successfully avoided reading MSM shit for a long time, because what you are replying to (and 99% of the garbage PUD posted on this thread) is copied from various MSM articles, and not cited. In other words, what you would expect from a BOT.
Remember that article here on ZH some months ago about the FED looking for ways to follow public opinion on blogs, forums and other alternative media? Looks like the jokes that they were looking for spam bots and troll bots weren't too far off!
Good point, Long XAU. And you're right: I've studiously avoided the MSM for many years, only reading the FT once in a great while to shout abuse at Martin Wolf.
Haven't watched television since the 1970's, when a neighborhood B&E specialist made off with our old Devil Box. What a favor the little maggot did us.
Some green folks are neither lib-tards nor eco-tards in worship of ManBearBig.
engineer775 : https://www.youtube.com/user/engineer775/videos?view=0&sort=dd&flow=list
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo8dFPLGTYY : green gizmos for sustainable living
charcoal / wood boiler BBQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSaZne845g4
recovering heat while making charcoal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvtxprMm6KU
gasifier assembly & carburetor : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaIxxochPkw
biochar : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z583o8J4iKA
thermal powerplant (boiler) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fXW9Q8KQTE
@nmewn, now THAT'S the kinda fuckin knockout punch i'm talkin about ! amen brother...............................
PUD looks very much like a copy-paste bot (his/her/its source, not cited: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/international/24GOLD.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0).
So? Greenies should just support fiat dollars and the armies and navals fleets that uphold it in the Mid-East and elsewhere.
Placer Dome, wow you're right on time with that. Its called Barrick Gold now, you putz.
And if we would just listen to Al Bore and implement carbon credits everything would be skittles and unicorns right? Well at least for Wall Street. Greenies,leftards and their fiat police state are worse for the environment than any mining operations. Pretty sure when WW3 breaks out due to central bankster policies that will be worse for the environment but keep worshipping the TITB lemming.
Because B is worse than A, A is good. Interesting view.
You just stabbed that man! Yes, but I didn't stab him twice!
Great comments of yours PUD but we miss the upbeat
tone and the exclamation marks ! Let`s dig it out !
I don`t think you are truly vicious or one of those most wanted for enviro-nazi type you get voted for.
Have you possession ? Will give peace of mind. Leftist self hate? Check your ancestors anthropologically . Mismatches not your fault, but defaulting by nature. Your upcoming? You told about it more we wanted to know.
Nature versus nurture laid to rest.
You are replying to a copy-paste excerpt from a MSM article (not cited). Nuff said. That should explain all.
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
TROLL ALERT
Most likely a copy-paste bot (his/her/its source, not cited: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/international/24GOLD.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
So, stop mining it. Gold works fine as money without increasing the supply.
+1, but right. All that money will just be left in the ground. Until somebody needs more, anyway. ;-)
Like the ever expanding EPA, for a budget enhancement.
Wow. I don't get the junkinhg here. Ths statement is substantially true- not that I grew up in a gold mining town or anything.
agree....but that is the nature of the internet, blogs, and, well, the coffee clatch i belong to.
:)
Since you are against gold, you have to be for paper, and we all know how paper currencies end. They all fail, 100% of the time, with no exception, always, with enormous losses of wealth and associated destruction.
The difference now is that all currencies are failing at the same time, just at slightly differnent speed and will probably implode in value at slightly different times, perhaps with a few islands of stability in the intermediate future, but looking at Switzerland does not offer much of a promising future for maintaining strong fiat currencies, if even Switzerland cannot do it.
If you would calculate the suffering, waste, wealth destruction, loss of lives, destruction through debt funded wars and conflicts and associated resource waste from excesses in fiat money including but not limited to real estate bubbles, stock market bubbles, commodity bubbles and corresponding write-offs of industrial capital mis-allocated in overcapacity and loss of revenue streams as a result of underinvestment in other things, you would find that gold mining, if done responsibly, is incomparably more environmentally friendly. Add to this the unsustainable deficit spending on welfare, pension funds and other benefits promised in the past paid in the future that is not backed by savings and it is clear that a non gold backed monetary system does little to further the progress of mankind.
And finally, try to get this into your head: the money supply does not have to increase at all for a free market to prosper. We could just as well stop mining today and use the existing gold.
+1
agreed.
now as to another possible solution...,if done responsibly, not increasing the money supply across the world would do the same as using an element as the basis for control.
of course, responsibly is the issue.
nothing new,
but i am in a posting mood this a.m.
:)
"Since you are against gold, you have to be for paper"
This sounds almost like our lovely MSM!
How about... I don't give a damn about gold and paper?!
"Since you are against gold, you have to be for paper"
No. If you are not FOR A, that does not mean you MUST be for B.
"we all know how paper currencies end. They all fail, 100% of the time, with no exception, always, with enormous losses of wealth and associated destruction."
Why is that a bad thing? Why not embrace the inevitable death and rebirth of paper money? Obviously, the vast majority of people prefer fiat, or they'd all be hoarding gold. Well, the majority of savers, since the majority have no savings.
"If you would calculate the suffering, waste, wealth destruction, loss of lives, destruction through debt funded wars and conflicts and associated resource waste from excesses in fiat money"
Because these problems did not exist without paper money? Didn't you watch the video, the Nazi's were invading countries and incinerating people just to get gold. The fiat is not the problem, human nature is.
"Add to this the unsustainable deficit spending on welfare, pension funds and other benefits promised in the past paid in the future that is not backed by savings and it is clear that a non gold backed monetary system does little to further the progress of mankind."
The Romans did this with silver as money. I don't see how gold would be fundamentally different. Gold has been money for thousands of years, but somehow, all of these problems existed before paper money.
"And finally, try to get this into your head: the money supply does not have to increase at all for a free market to prosper. We could just as well stop mining today and use the existing gold."
And how, pray tell, would you prevent everyone everywhere in the world from mining for gold, if it was THE money of the world, and kept increasing in value?
The case for gold vs paper is pretty clear cut. In case it was not beyond obvious, paper means unbacked credit and not paper receipts for deposits or otherwise claims on unencumbered metal.
Paper currencies end simply because they are currencies and as such lack the function of a permanent long term store of value. Currencies present the facade and appearance of money but in reality are trojan horses that convey a means of taxation and government power, in conjunction with excessively sized corporations that profits from the system and not from the free market and thus grow larger than could be sustained on a free market basis. Anyone who is against backing currencies with gold and proposes non-backed currencies are afraid of the discipline of gold. They cannot handle it. They want to steal, deceive and act as parasites on productive citizens. They will do everything they can, intellectually and through violent means, to suppress information and transformation towards a gold backed system. They will find every enumerable excuse possible. And I for one, stand firm against this recklessness and sloppy thinking.
There is no middle ground to be found. The gold is either there or it is not. The question is, how much gold is really there. In a floating exchange rate system, nobody knows, but most likely, less than yesterday.
The second point about the Nazi gold is just outright below the belt. How do you have the guts to bring in war crimes as a reason for anything? Do not you understand what Nazi Germany was all about? The whole story started with a certain person called Hitler, and do you know how he came to power? Surprise, he was voted in democratically by an improverished middle class! How did they get impoverished? Have you ever heard about the German hyperinflation, you intellectual moron? Had Germany not issued excess currency, the German economy would have adjusted prices lower, and ordinary Germans would have been able to afford daily necessities. Instead, the Weimar government plunged into outright money printing, destroying trust, stores of value and entire swathes of society in the process Hitler never have be able to obtain the mass political support he got. So do not bring in the "Nazi gold" crap because you are missing the entire point.
Somehow, all these problems existed before, and there seem to be patterns in history. We are dealing with something fundamental here, which is a combination of human behavior, incentives, marginal utility, tragedy of the commons and corruption of power. Your fundamental problem appears to be that you take for granted that human behavior is evil, which it is not. By establishing institutions, such as the gold standard, proper behavior will follow. Gold is, when applied properly, the soundest institution known to man that stands in the way of perverted incentives to deceive by currency debasement, parasiting on the common good and trust in the societal medium of exchange. It is also an institution that stands in the way of the type of resource consolidation needed to wage large scale wars, thus indirectly also being conducive to a more peaceful world. Rome expanded beyond its means, primarily through conquest and territorial war campaigns, living on surplus generated by others, forcing it to debase its currency. The decline of the empire went hand in hand with the debasement of the currency. Had Rome lived within its means, history would have been very different. We might as well all have been speaking Italian.
There are no countries in the world that have been able to build a sustainable economy that has generated high yielding productive capital by expanding the money supply. Rising prices means decreasing prosperity and reduced yields, not increasing prosperity.
There are no economies where fiat money excesses and overleveraging has not caused immense economic destruction, personal hardships and vast tragedies.
The point about not having to mine the remaining gold was, of course, in its most essential form a philosophical argument, but fundamentals imply that this is what will happen in reality and this predicament will have monetary policy implications in years to come. Ore grades have now declined so much that it is no longer possible to increase mining production. Despite high gold prices, mining production is declining. Within this decade, much if not most production will go offline due to increasing costs and energy requirements. Do not take my word for it. Look up production data and geological information. Try to understand what is driving mining companies into bankruptcy. I and the analysts that point this basic fact out will be found right, and the world will have to do the best it can with the gold it already has. This will happen within one to two decades due to physical reality. And it better do.
So when you talk about gold as money, you mean that all purchases would have to be made with physical gold? Otherwise, you are still subject to the problems of fractional reserve, trust and fraud.
If you do use physical gold as money, the amounts you would have to use for small purchases would be tiny grains. Otherwise, you would still end up depositing the gold in a bank and using electronic transactions, which inevitably will lead to fractional reserving and fraud.
"Your fundamental problem appears to be that you take for granted that human behavior is evil, which it is not."
The problem is, I believe, that people tend to self-select for professions. People who choose to become police tend to be people who want to "get the bad guys", people who go for politics tend to be people who want to make rules and control other people's lives, etc. You end up with concentrations of people with similar personalities within these professions, so you get similar results every iteration of society.
It depends on how you define a sustainable society. Obviously, none of them, using gold or paper, has lasted indefinitely.
Anyone can choose whatever they want to use as money. The main problem is that everyone is forced to use national currencies by decree. Who am I to tell you what to use? Keep using national currencies issued by your leader, if you will, but do not imprison or otherwise legally go after those who wishes to transact and account with honest weights and measures.
Using paper or electronic receipts that are backed by gold does not "inevitably lead to fractional reserve banking and fraud". There are no grounds for making this statement and similar thoughts keep popping up within various anti gold communities which serves to reveal your own bias rather than add substance to the debate. Instead of conjuring your own postulates that have no backing whatsoever in historical facts, we can look at the last country that left the gold standard: Switzerland, that has had a highly viable gold standard, direct democracy, personal freedom, gun ownership, sovereignty on an individual and international level and many other things. And do you know what happened in Switzerland? The people were seduced by international bankers, read, IMF, to sell their gold and go off the gold standard, as their currency was being pushed up higher and higher by the ECB printing EUR recklessly. This was not an inevitable event by any means, but a consequence of people giving up their national sovereignty to unelected officials in the EU, ECB and IMF to run their lives for them.
There is no problem in having people "self select" professions and acting in their own self interest. The issue here is to establish an institution of money that can outlast individuals. We can not rely on the brilliance on individuals to sustain prosperity. It has to be backed by something more fundamental. To talk about this as some form of inevitable cycle just goes to show that you have abandoned your own hope, visions and passion for the future, and serves to present you as a lackluster, dull and rather uninspiring individual who is not willing to stand on principle on one of the most important questions of our time.
You can speak for yourself in case you support these things, but many people do not, and if they had their will, we would not be in this mess.
TROLL ALERT
Most likely a copy-paste bot (his/her/its source, not cited: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2010/09/green_gold.html)
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
[camera pans cosmos] 'Billions of years ago....'
Did she just channel Carl Sagan??
I just want to confirm to the crowd that the metal shops in HK are crowded.
These are local retail establishments that sell gold jewelry and other PM nick knacks. I have never seen them as busy.
My local coin and bullion dealers are closed. They never opened the doors after the paper take down. I tried to call and just got an answering machine that said it was full and could not take any more messages. The Pawn Shops have taken their Gold and Silver items off the shelves as well.
My vender took silver off the menu, saying premiums were too high for now. Gold was available at good prices 2-5% over spot.
+/- 7% premium at my LCS for AGEs. When they have 'em, they only had two for me to buy over the last week.
Same here in Sydney. ABC Bullion is the biggest bullion dealer in Australia. Mon, Tue, Wed last week, when I looked, there were queues of up to 50 people waiting to be served. There might be 1-5 people there on a 'normal' day. They put out an email on Thu requesting patience in receiving bullion paid for, as they had sold record quantities.
"They put out an email on Thu requesting patience in receiving bullion paid for, as they had sold record quantities."
Now, there is something that should scare the troops. Lev-er-age at play here? Committed to price but didn't cover?
I'd have to find out where that dealer lives and let him know that I know.
Had a guy do this to me back in the late 70's. He made it good after 3 months or so, an extra ounce for good will, only because he was of an old family in a small western town. Otherwise, he'd still be washing my windows!
Give us back Glass-Steagal and burn all paper gold!
I watched it. I liked it fairly good. But one thing I didn't like, is the lady seem to repeat numerous times that gold was surrounded by intrigue, murder, and war. Baloney(bologna). It may have been quite some time ago now, but the normal average person used to use carry gold and silver coinage in their pocket for spending... or paper notes that represented and were redeemable for gold and silver, at a bank! We've only been on this fiat standard for forty years. We were a lot better off on a Gold Standard, for a lot longer time than that(personally i favor a "free competition in currency"). There were no "bailouts". Instead you got bought out, if someone thought it was really worth it to do so.
Haters will always hate one tin.
omg, it's Stefan Molyneux! Your writing is in the same voice as his, so is that really you?
but the normal average person used to use carry gold and silver coinage in their pocket for spending... or paper notes that represented and were redeemable for gold and silver, at a bank!
That was THEN this is now.
People were more moral than we are NOW as a society( the nation was founded on Biblical prinicples, and the rule of law,and the masses were Americans, no matter the ethnicity), which was followed for the most part, and they used what was Const issued real money.There is no difference to a thief, who will murder you for $5.00 today if a chance is available, and if you drug out gold and silver coins,or flashed a wad of fiat your life is at stake anywhere.
"But one thing I didn't like, is the lady seem to repeat numerous times that gold was surrounded by intrigue, murder, and war. "
When is the last time one country invaded another to steal pieces of paper?
Some talking heads on TV told me I lost a lot of my Gold and Silver. I went and checked my hoard and found it's all still there. WTF are they talking about?
They talk in terms of gold and silver losing value in relation to paper money. What they don't tell you is what paper money is. Everyone knows what an ounce of Gold is. Paper money depends up what your definition of "is", is. Or perhaps it could be defined as 5.6 cents(?) in paper and ink value that can have any denomination that a Government wants to print on it. But I don't recall hearing that discussion and the reasons behind it on TV.
I lost all mine in a boating accident.
That's my story, and I'll stick to it under domestic torture.
Edit: But I will reveal the location of some worthless obscure foreign fiat.
In the failed Senate gun bill, they tried to slip in a clause that said anybody who doesn't report a lost gun in a boating accident within 24 hours to the 'authorities' will get 5 years in jail. TRUE!
...Well, except for part specifying a boating accident. But it actually did include any lost gun not reported in 24 hours.
So, if they ever knocked on your door later to confiscate your gun they could lock you up for 5 years, for each gun, if you didn't cough 'em up. I suspect if they ever decide to confiscate PMs the same Nazi tactic will apply.
I sold both of my guns for cash at the Gun Show on March 24. No, he did not give me any paper, so sorry.
"People are reducing their holdings", George Soros as quoted prior to recent paper collapse and Reuters obituary.
www.tradewithdave.com
The US economy SUCKS. Net savings are being depleated, not built up. For every one dollar in fiat that a the relatively small population of PM stackers saves to buy more metal, how many ounces are being digitized in order to cover bills?
Unless you are an immortal Central Bank or vampire squid, the investment timeline is relatively short and stacking phase is only part of it. Even before the current economic downturn, I had a retired neighbor who had been stacking for half a century and saving for retirement, he encountered some unscheduled medical expenses a number of years ago (when the economy was supposedly good) and had to paperize a whole lot metal ounces (for a poor dirt farmer).
So he was going to retire from retiring?
He was trying to prevent that...
Stacking over that period of time you might think his cost basis would be closer to the mean average price over time.
Unfortunately the cost basis didn't help with the fact he needed 2005??? paper dollars for large medical and home-care bills and was trying to raise $20k-$30k. I think Silver was about $7 and gold about $420 (but he had only a handful of coins) at the time. He was more interested in liquidating silver, so I helped him out with the cash I had at the time and gave him a better price than he could get from dealer or I would normally pay to a dealer, but by the time he was done selling it was certainly thousands and ounces of silver out of the stack, and most "average" stackers I know don't have bottomless pit sized piles of metal, and guestimating his wealth it was years of savings to cover one bad year of retirement, but broader issue of cash-flow to pay for retirement is an issue that a lot of stackers don't like to discuss, but certainly impact the marketplace as more and more stackers "retire".
Are the down arrows because people are NOT reducing their holdings or because Reuters retracted the Soros obituary.
Nowhere is this problem of mercury contamination more urgent than in Colombia. Gold mining is Colombia’s fastest growing industry, with 200,000 small-scale miners producing more than 50 percent of the country’s gold. This growth has turned Colombia into the world’s leading per-capita emitter of mercury, especially in states such as Antioquia, where Segovia is located.
Ground-level concentrations of mercury gas in gold-processing hamlets like Segovia are so high, experts fear the outbreak of an environmental health crisis worse than any caused by mercury since Minamata, Japan, where releases of mercury from a factory in the mid-20th century killed more than 1,700 people. Last year, scientists working for the United Nations Global Mercury Project recorded levels of mercury gas in Segovia’s center — near public schools and crowded markets — 1,000 times higher than World Health Organization limits.
All so you can jingle coins in your pockets or give yourself a false sense of security...Or to speculate in the wall st casino hoping to win a windfall of fiat to indulge yourself.
Starve.
Don't care.
Then I feel sorry for you. You are obviously dysfunctional.
And you are clearly a self indulgent and none too bright hypocrite.
Just to make it clear:
Do you use oil? Or gas or plastics, rubber or pharmaceuticals? How about concrete, steel, glass or electricity? Do you eat meat? Pig, cow or chicken? How about cereals?
Because if you do any of these things you are contributing to environmental damage which is orders of magnitude larger than gold mines produce.
So please shut the fuck up until you can truthfully say you have minimised your own environmental impact by excluding everything listed.
"Because you already are causing pollution simply by existing, creating more pollution is good." - You, just now.
PUD, do you have any idea how much damage we are doing to the environment just being alive?
The planet is dying because of all of our very existence.
Rather than making meaningless posts, let's all kill ourselves and never post again.
So, in a gesture of environmental leadership, I nominate PUD to kill himself first, to be followed shortly thereafter by the rest of us.
Do I have a second?
Don't Drink the Kool-Aid!
But seriously, it really boils down to what you consider environmental damage. If we use the "renewable" metric of one human lifetime, what damage is any of us normally doing, that cannot be undone within the span of a human lifetime?
On a really long time line, in the millions of years, it does not matter; most species alive today will no longer exist, and new ones will come about to take their place, adapting to whatever the conditions are at that time.
From a practical standpoint, all that really matters is the damage that severely affects us now, and the damage that takes more than 100 years to undo.
Really bro, do you understand what makes the internet possible?
PUD makes a good point. I'm gonna stop stacking gold and silver and start stacking ammo, non-perishable food, fuel, seeds and water purification supplies.
TROLL ALERT
Most likely a copy-paste bot (his/her/its source, not cited: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/threat_of_mercury_poisoning_rises_with_gold_mining_boom/2354/)
That's the third article so far that I find that he/she/it copies from and pastes into posts on this thread alone, and doesn't even cite the source.
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
Instead of bitching about it on another random website that talks about gold, how about you catch the earliest convenient flight to Columbia and teach them how to refine gold using Borax.
Gold mining is extremely dangerous work for children. Yet still today, tens of thousands are found in the small-scale gold mines of Africa, Asia and South America. Children work both above and under ground. In the tunnels and mineshafts they risk death from explosions, rock falls, and tunnel collapse. They breathe air filled with dust and sometimes toxic gases. Above ground, children dig, crush, mill, and haul ore – often in the hot sun. Some stand for hours in water, digging sand or silt from riverbeds
These hard-working miners include many thousands of children. They work long hours at often dangerous jobs in hundreds of primitive mines scattered through the West African bush. Some are as young as 4 years old.
The spike in gold prices over the past seven years has lured increasing numbers of poor people, including child recruits, to bush mines. The United Nations labor agency estimates there are now 100,000 to 250,000 child gold miners in West Africa alone.Of 500,000 gold miners tested in Brazil, more than 30% showed mercury levels above the World Health Organization's tolerable limits.
Fisheries suffer from heavy siltation and toxic run-off into waterways from gold mines. Today, mines scrape away and dig up more earth than do the world's rivers through natural erosion! The impact on wildlife is hard to calculate, but between 1980 and 1990 seven thousand birds were found dead near cyanide-laced ponds at gold mines in California, Nevada, and Arizona - the tip of the iceberg of gold mine-related wildlife deaths.
Researchers from North Carolina, France and Peru, using Landsat satellite images, have found that deforestation in an area of southeastern Peru called Madre de Dios, has increased six-fold in recent years.
The researchers reported their findings April 19 in the online journal PLoS ONE that some 7,000 hectares (about 12,500 acres) of pristine tropical forest and wetlands were cleared between 2003 and 2009.
Jennifer Swenson, assistant professor of the practice of geospatial analysis at Duke University, said the deforestation was taking place mainly in two mining areas and in scattered sites, mostly along the rivers. The deforestation now is growing more than 26 percent a year.
The miners now are clearing an area equal to four-and-a-half football fields a day, she said.
While the deforestation for mining is not yet a major factor in damage to the huge Amazon basin, the mercury is.
That mercury is present in dangerous amounts is not debatable. One study by the Peruvian Ministry of Production found mercury in the rivers three to 25 times the legal amount. Tests have found many fish contaminated.
In 2009, Luis Fernandez of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. found levels of mercury in the air outside of gold shops in Puerto Maldonado, the largest city in the area, greatly exceeded safety standards.
In one shop the mercury was literally off the scale. His equipment couldn’t register amounts that high. Even shoppers passing by were breathing it.
What is happening in Peru also is a problem in the forests of Brazil, where Silbergeld does her research. People down river from the mines are affected.
There are ways of mitigating the damage, Fraser says. Using filters on the ovens would cut down on mercury, for instance. Regulation would be difficult. There are as many as 100,000 miners and they refuse regulation, sometimes violently.
Hope you like the upvotes.
thank you
You do realise that the very governments that would be responsible for increasing the regulation of gold mining have a vested interest in supressing the price of gold (and hence its extraction cost), right?
and,
That if the price of gold were allowed to rise in fixed proportion to government debt (as it was priced before Nixon closed the gold window) that wealth transfer to millions of artisanal gold miners would lift them out of poverty?
If you look up the study, the number cited is 6,600 hectares, which is actually 16,309 acres. You need a new conversion algorithm. Also, the claim in the study is that mercury imports in the region correlate to gold prices. So I guess that mercury usage should decrease significantly with the latest decrease in gold prices.
The article.
I pay my miners by percentage, the crew splits 5 dwt per oz produced. Much better money than working in town. Gold is the largest export, and it has transformed the infrastructure of this country in the last ten years. I now have reliable power supply, domestic water at 5 or 6 psi, vs days long outages a few years back. Many operators overuse mercury, I have about 40 lbs in my house under guard, it's nearly essential for this type of mining.
The child miner thing is overplayed, indian kids just move with their families following the work, there are no schools in gold camps, so they may help the parents a bit...learn a trade, mechanics, whatever, it's better than daycare for the family and the kid...
I've seen far better posters than you get banned here for far less (Lennon Hendrix for one).
If I was a Tyler, I'd kick you to the curb for posting endless misinformation and propaganda on gold.
Oh, and fuck you asshole.
While I am normally loath to tell another poster to "fuck you", in the case of this egregious troll PUD I do believe it is quite appropriate and fully deserved.
We have not seen this kind of determined, and absurdly idiotic, anti-gold trolling since the days of JonnyBravo. Again, dear PUD: fuck you. You are a vile, dishonest and disingenuous bastard who adds absolutely nothing to the conversation here except diversion, ignorance and pointless antagonism.
Excellent summary of what the mainstream media does. After all, PUD's posts are like 98% copied from various MSM articles. PUD, at least in this thread, acts exactly like a BOT.
One can easily and definitively identify such a copy-paste bot, as I already explained in other posts.
Another 1% of what he wrote looks like replies from a chat bot.
The remaining 1% of what he wrote could be an actual person writing. It clearly looks different, barely using any capital letters or punctuation, other than the occasional "...".
I am tempted to troll him/her back, but it might well be nothing but a bot, so no point.
Starve.
TROLL ALERT
Most likely a copy-paste bot.
To easily and definitively identify one you can select and copy a random sentence from the post, open google.com and paste the sentence, surrounding it within double quotation marks (") and search (e.g. https://google.com/search?q=%22Yet+still+today%2C+tens+of+thousands+are+found+in+the+small-scale+gold+mines+of+Africa%2C+Asia+and+South+America.%22). He/she/it doesn't cite a source.
This shit is copied so many times on the internet that I don't know (nor care) which is the original source.
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
You should see how much mercury came from thrown out thermometers. It far exceeds gold mining since not everyone had a gold mine or stake in one yet at one time almost everyone had a damn mercury thermometer and now almost everyone has mercury fluorescent lights including backlights for laptops.
tag
TROLL ALERT
Most likely a copy-paste bot.
To easily and definitively identify one you can select and copy a random sentence from the post, open google.com and paste the sentence, surrounding it within double quotation marks (") and search (e.g. https://google.com/search?q=%22Yet+still+today%2C+tens+of+thousands+are+found+in+the+small-scale+gold+mines+of+Africa%2C+Asia+and+South+America.%22). He/she/it doesn't cite a source.
This shit is copied so many times on the internet that I don't know (nor care) which is the original source.
DON'T FEED THE TROLL
Air
Water
Food
Shelter
Warmth
And all to get the above...
Accumulation of these items, is less important than the means to produce them after the government confiscates everything for the "common good."
One thing I fail to understand is that why most analysts are recommending the purchase of Gold as a safe investment? The problem today is that the price of Gold is not derived by it's physical demand or supply but more by the speculative positions standing long or short on the commodity exchange like any other traded commodity, stock or currency.
The basic mechanism of price discovery (based on demand and supply for actual use) of anything traded on an exchange has been terminally infected by speculators having access to unlimited funds and super fast computers for trading leading to volatile price swings. This has been made worse by the launch of ETFs for anything and everything under the sun by the financial community.
The price of everything including Gold is likely to suffer when the speculators unwind their positions due to some event that they have not anticipated or foreseen.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article35345.html
www.letstalkmoney2012.in
I have said it before, I'll say it again......$5000 gold, $50 gold shouldn't matter to one who owns it. Whether u bought at $1900 or $600 it's real exchange value never changes! Price is a monetary phenomena as demarcated by fiat. A preoccupation with price distracts people from the entire reason why you should be holding it.
The question is not whether gold is going to $5000 or $50. The only relevant question is "which world would you rather live in? $5000 gold or $50 gold? This is the only question gold holders should be concerned about. EVER.
and the other thing, personally I think we've seen the lows in gold.. while all those waiting for 1k or 800 might be right technically , the problem with that thinking is there's a good chance it goes from $800 to $2000 over night with nary a chance to get in for the ride. Good luck picking the generational bottom. (which I believe is already in)
Pareto, I will sell 1000 gold eagles, at $5,000 each in Federal Reserve notes.
Will you accept this offer?
Of course not.
Your post is foolish.
Don't be a fucking retard! Price is a monetary phenomenon. Your hypothetical is unrealistic. And who knows what I would pay for your eagles but it sure wouldn't be $5000 since market is $1400 fuck stick. The point, if you follow the fucking thread is whether gold is an investment as the discussion always comes down to the price as measured in fiat. The point is that this a fool's query because at the end of the day, fiat price don't matta, only the real exchange value. But. Seems like you got it all fucking figured out including prices. Your fucking brilliant.
I certainly have it figured out respecting someone who posts that "it doesn't matter what the price of gold is."
So, buy my gold eagles at $5000. And sell me your silver eagles at $6.
Why won't you do that, if price is irrelvant?
Might I suggest that your posting about "the price doesn't matter" after the recent 30%+ crash in silver price, is merely emotional wound licking?
If not, then .... buy my gold eagles at $5000, and sell me your silver at $6.
Because it's a retarded hypothetical. Because if I want to sell it I can go to my bullion dealer and fetch market price. But again, you are not getting it. The price decline has also been seen in land prices. In real exchange the oz is still buying what it bought before at gold $1900. If gold were to decline to $50 then the general price level will demonstrate an equivalent decline. I trade my gold at market and buy the same shit that my gold bought at $1900.
Nobody is making an apology (licking wounds). Fact is you ought to be largely indifferent. But, you can't get past nominal values. So discussion ends here.
+1 Pareto.
The price of an ounce of gold I hold doesn't matter. It will most likely always buy me a suit of clothes, a meal, a bath and a bed, as it always has.
In fact, I don't look at it as a fluctuation in golds price as much as I do a fluctuation in the dollars perceived present and future retail value.
Now, you others, sure, I'll give you $5k for an ounce, if that's the market value of the buck at the time.
Hell, I'll go $10,000 in a Wiemar charade....do I hear a $trillion?
On the last day of that circus, it was said that one ounce of Au would have bought the entire Berlin Financial District. Check on that though, but I don't find it out of line.
I'm sure if one had bought an ounce a year before, then mortgaged the Financial District at the same time, that ounce would have paid off the loan, at about the time Marks were being used in boilers to heat homes because they were cheaper than coal.
most analysts are making no such claim. Most, and I hear them in conferences, refer to gold as a risk asset and prefer to have none. Most funds I've heard speak to their clients recommend no holdings of gold and hold none. A handful hold a small %. Very small and very experimentally.
One of my fav economist, Andy Xie, has made the call that gold has bottom:
http://english.caixin.com/2013-04-19/100516606.html
"Gold Has Bottomed…
The recent crash has cleansed the gold market of speculative liquidity. The demand for gold is mainly from emerging economies that face chronically high inflation. The recent growth deceleration pushes these economies into stagflation. Their demand for gold is likely to be persistent.
At the beginning of the year, I was positive on gold for the second half of 2013. I was expecting a rising dollar and strong stock market to dampen gold demand. As a weak global economy eventually cools stock markets, gold will come back."
Economic forecasting is like trying to drive a car blindfolded and following directions given by a person who is looking out of the back window.
Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, a highly esteemed economist, and an old drunk were walking down the street together when they simultaneously spotted a $100 bill. Who got it?
The old drunk, of course. The other three are mythical creatures.
I'll tell you who owns it, it's that damn sasquatch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS2Z19yTuPI
Hundred to One leverage - seems about right.
So many articles on PMs (gold mostly) start to really make me concerned (more than usual that is). ZH is really digging in on this direction.
Not that I am against owning PMs. Hedging against insanity and potential for outright failure is definately needed. Just saying though... there are a whole bunch of different ways this could play out.
Point is, do you have a 100 to 1 leverege?
Here's something to think about.
If there is 100-1 leverage in the paper markets, then holders of the unlimited paper have to shake out 99 out of every 100 holders of paper gold.
They can achieve that by announcing it was all a giant fraud or ponzi scheme and in the process discredit themselves and impair their own authority and power, or they can continue to monkey hammer the paper markets until the depletion of physical supply lays bare their fraud for even the MSM-grazing sheeple to see.
Whether it is 10-1 or 100-1 leverage actually makes a huge difference. At 10-1 they might be able to pull it off, or some approximation that is good enough for government work (accounting), but not at 100-1.
Regardless, they will continue their efforts at beautiful deleveraging, until it becomes ugly deleveraging.
In the recent article by Fekete, he points out that the recent FED shenanigans of forcing the paper gold price down is self defeating as the cheaper price makes it easier for long contract holders to stand for delivery. So the 100 to 1 will be reduced by the FED itself. This will lead ever closer to COMEX Force Majeure. [http://feketeresearch.com/upload/Who-said-the-hydra-would-take-it-lying-...]
Why do gold bugs waste so much time and energy convincing people to buy physical gold? It’s real simple: you buy gold; you lock it up and wait for Armageddon. What people should be discussing in detail is how we can avoid being killed, or locked up in FEMA camps when the SHTF.
Why doe gold bugs 'waste' time like this?
In large part to defend against the 'paper bugs.
Actually, owning gold\silver and avoiding the FEMA camps are kind of hand n glove...
the very act of buying the stuff marks a change in your pyschology...from being a trusting dupe who goes blithely along with anything they are spoon-fed...to a suspicious kind of personality who marks out every bit of new data as a potential trail of lies. An increasingly valuable trait in a world of increasing deception and mind-bending duplicity. You get up in the morning and immediately start to sniff the air for danger and intrusive 'authorities'...and their scammin ways!
So above and beyond the debate about it's overt economic value, the shiney stuff acts as an antidote to being a dope. Best defense in a SHTF world...survival skills and a bad attitude. Fiat folders will be roadkill...or soupline attendees. Golden holders will be mean n wily...like in the old westerns. Saddlebags///bitchez!
Tell you what. Find the remaining surviving Jews or at least their children and ask them how they escaped the Nazi camps in Germany.
Gold.
The giant yellow trucks lumbered on six-foot high tires to the cliff's edge. The driver, in a cabin high above the ground, raised the 200-ton beds and released a massive slide of rock and mud debris hauled from the Porgera gold mine. Big muddy bulldozers, the size of a small house, emerged from the evening cloud cover to push more dirt into the valley below.
And so it goes all day every day in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. After 14 years, the mine waste has slowly torn the hills from under the local inhabitants and turned the small valley below, an extension of the Porgera Valley, into a choked river of dirt creeping toward the Gulf of Papua two hundred miles away.
The destruction is fueled by gold. Mining for gold is one of the world's most grotesque industries, consuming vast resources and producing mountains of waste to produce a small amount of soft, pliable metal with few practical uses. To make one gold wedding band, at least 20 tons of earth must be excavated.
All so some fat american woman can wear a golden cross with a dead guy nailed to it on her chest and you fools can horde it. Happy? To participate in this you must either be willfully ignorant or incredibly callus and unethical
methinks lady doth protest too much. Is this a new trolling tactique - environmental concern???
Simply providing the truth. I don't know why that should be considered trolling.
I don't disagree with you in principle, it just seems like you have an agenda. If you are genuinely concerned with environment, perhaps this is not the best site to exercise activism. Perhaps there’s a plastic-bag lovers website where we could all crash and make trouble.
This is the perfect place to enlighten people about the ugly side of gold. You don't fight alcoholism in the churches you go to the bars.
Gold prices would not be where they are if governments had behaved in a fiscally responsible manner. As with alcoholism, treat the cause, not the symptom.
Agreed but that does not condone you adding your weight to the destruction by supporting such a vile enterprise
Gold mining accounts for only a very small portion of the gold stock (about 1.5% annualy). Do you know how much gold is in the computer you are using to type these messages? That is gold that will most likely never be recovered. By this measure, your contributions are far more vile than those who keep gold in the non destructive form of bullion.
PUD, as usual your "argument" is merely specious, irrelevant and hypocritical bullshit.
If you are so concerned about the environment, there are probably 100 other extractive industries that are FAR more environmentally damaging than gold mining. What about the almost endless wastelands resulting from petroleum mining in the tar sands of Alberta, or the many of hundreds of square miles rendered dead and toxic by the frenzied rare earth mining in China, or for that matter the many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of square miles of productive topsoil that have been lost worldwide due to poor agricultural practices in the last 50 years?
Really, it is demeaning to even have to stoop so low as to address your nonsense. Now, please take your ridiculous and intellectually vacuous anti-gold propaganda and shove it up your ass, then kill yourself and do all of us, including yourself, a favor.
Awsome. AKAK goes to bat...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-RkGZqpCfU
Wow, that was confusingly subtle. We're you commending akak on a skillful rebuttal or taunting him over his dislike of sports. Or am I overanalyzing this?
Miffed;-)
Hey, Pathetic Urban Dickhead, give it up, you're getting boring.
It's like what the man with beard said.
By admitting you are trying to convert others you admit to being a troll.
And your criticisms of its harvest do nothing to attack gold's worth as a store of value.
Are you sure? And what do you care? I read what you posted and I have this to say: Shut the fuck up.
the ugly side of gold is not nearly as ugly as that of aluminum or plastics from petroleum, things your survival depends on and certainly your comfort.
Wow. What a hypocrite you are.
Stop reading us Unabomber's manifesto. It's no good for you.
Considering Tyler Durden is an imaginary character, in the mind of a fictional character, who tries to basically convert the modern world to the vision of the Unabomber ...
By blowing up the primary dealers ...
attacking hypocritical christians worshipping graven images has nothing to do with gold.
Many are made with other things and are still as hypocritical.
Again....as pointed on in other replies to your postings and to paraphrase those replies 'so what is the damage to those same people and countries due to the ponzi scheme of fiat?'
To be fair, you should compare the two.
While I'm all for better ecological protection of my planet, I'd say the ponzi scheme has done far worse damage to all.
Human Rights report here:
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/png0211webwcover.pdf
Human Rights Watch is a fuckin' joke of an organization. Their reports are nothing but thinly veiled calls for greater State control of everything.
The rain and water on planet Earth in one single day causes more erosion and excavation than all human activity does in 5+ years.
The Amazon River alone pushes entire mountains 200 miles out to sea. The Himalayas alone produces 25% of all atmospheric CO2 just from the granite erosion (Calcium Carbonate) from rain and streams.
Humans are still just ants pushing around little ant hills compared to nature's excavation and erosion. Get some perspective and get over yourself. Don't be like the Unabomber or that other freak who took hostages at Discovery Place trying to save the planet.
Better to remain a silent fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
The Amazon river does not leach out toxic metals locked up inside rock formations, nor does it leach out cyanide or mercury...The natural flooding of great rivers is part of the balance of life that restores ecosystems vs. massive mining operations that do nothing but harm.
Why do you stupid people wave red flags to draw attention to yourself?
If you stopped ad hominum attacks (ie name calling eg: "stupid people") your words might sprout in others.
the irony of his overbearing argument is that some would claim that there's enough above-ground gold on the planet right at this moment to stop 90% of environmental destruction dead in its tracks and make every single person on the planet wealthy beyond their wildest dreams without ever mining another ounce. but that's a secret history you won't see on CBC (although they tangentially allude to it very very briefly in the beginning).
Follow your own advice. Toxic metals in the rocks definitely seep out of rocks from erosion & that's definitely how we first found most of them, and other minerals or metals we want, including gold or silver.
"Fred C. Dobbs don't say nothin' he don't mean."
Am going to start an "Odyssey" firm , ill get a boat and name it "Terrorista#2"
Please register your name here.
This last gold-takedown will be the start of a big unprecedented rally of the yellow metal. Now is the time to buy for ultra low price levels. At these levels it is also fairly safe to take a leveraged position in gold (with the right safety stop in place of course). I think trading gold will be a big thing the coming years.
Until your paper trading firm bites the dust taking you wealth down with it. No thanks.
Indeed. Until paper gold bites the dust, use of gld calls and puts will far reduce risk yet net all the gains while suckers (who need to exist for other paper markets to exist) will trade gld shares directly & paper comex & lbma contracts (fools).
One day that gld will die and so will the options but in the mean time higher prices & high inflation mean lots of volatility upon which to profit. At the end I hope you have real gold. I will.
right now slv puts and calls even out to 2015 are also massively underpriced for the expected price move up - or down if that's what you prefer.
http://silverdoctors.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/FtKnoxGold.jpg
So how bout that fully open and transparent FULL audit of every vault at Fort Knox then?
If there is nothing to hide they would of done one far more recently than 1953.
There is a 1981 news clipping reporting Ft. Knox gold being moved out in 300 truck loads which had occured in 1973-4, over 5 months. (Max Keiser and silverdoctors also put the news article recently.)
Investigators in 1973 had been tipped off by Ft Knox workers regarding where and when the trucks would be moving out at night. Sure enough they could see the trucks pulling out as described and was documented over time. Newspaper report of the event was printed in 1981.
http://beforeitsnews.com/financial-markets/2013/04/1981-article-7000-ton...
Do you realize that The Globe is a tabloid, like Weekly World News (Bat Boy Kidnaps President!) and the like?
Do you believe in fairies and unicorns, too?
From Wiki:
Globe is a supermarket tabloid first published North America on November 10, 1954[2] inMontreal, Canada as Midnight by Joe Azaria and John Vader and became the chief competitor to the National Enquirer during the 1960s. In 1978 it changed its name to theMidnight Globe after its publisher, Globe Communications, and eventually changed its name to Globe. The newspaper, as well as most of its rivals, is now owned by American Media Inc. and is published out of American Media's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. Globe covers a widespread range of topics, including politics, celebrity news, human interest and high-profile crime stories. It recently led the fight to try to save TV's All My Children and One Life To Live.
Can't be checkin' the hot sheets
(flash)
I watched the videos and they were very good, but were an overview geared to newbies.
For me, there was simply not enough banging on the table how the criminality surrounding gold and unsound money usurps self government and destoys entire societies. That's why the world of gold is guarded by armies and secret in the first place.
I'm o.k. with that.
It's the 'newbies' that need to learn.
IMHO. If gold is moving from west to east then who gets hurt on paper when the market price declines? I dont think it is CBs who get hurt- they are agnostic to short term price fluctuations because the reason they accumulate gold is strategic and not profit oriented. Nonetheless one could imagine some political toll that a gold market price decline could exert on such CBs. on the other hand JPM and HSBC is more likely to act on behalf of other CBs who may be short gold (the Fed?). also, gold is the only serious contender to reserve currency status ie weaker gold and unreasonable price action in gold markets undermines gold credibility as an alternative reserve currency and by default improves USD status as the reserve currency. so again the Fed has a motive to direct gold market manipulation. I am not saying that the Fed did it- I have no concrete evidence of it but the Fed would benefit from what happened in the gold market recently.
Here's The Motley Fool:
Physical versus paper
Perhaps the global banksters are coordinating an attack on precious metals to protect their position, as the conspiracy theorists suggest, but if so, it seems their plan is backfiring, as they've instead created a tsunami of demand for physical gold and silver. Maybe governments are trying to sever the relationship precious metals have as safe-haven assets, but individuals still realize gold and silver has a store of value that can't be broken. So rather than placing a call to your stock broker to purchase certificates in exchange-traded funds, you just might want to visit your local precious-metals dealer and buy bullion instead.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/04/21/gold-fell-to-1400-welco...
I hope a 200 meter wide asteroid made of 50% gold, 50% silver, and 50% nickle hits NY and then the price of gold will be a more reasonable $200 an ounce.
Did you deliberately make yourself look retarded? Is it some sort of irony thing I'm missing?
I get my news from CBC. Gold is way over-priced. It's not even backed by anything.
LOL
some tard thinking that red-triangles cure sandy-vagina also wasn't wearing the Special Zerohedge Goggles(tm) that allow seeing the hidden /sarc
But wait! A 200 meter gold astroid striking NY! Erasing it from google map. Forever. Big lake there. With a gold bottom. I like it.
Has an Atlantis connotation, kinda. When that nugget hits the City, paper will fall from the sky for days. And GS will be under the mass of it. Coolness!
The stuff of epic disaster movies!