The risk that bail-ins pose to companies, trade, commerce, employment and entire economies is something at which we have looked frequently in recent months. Indeed, we think we are largely alone in focussing in detail on the risk that bail-ins pose not just to individual savers but also to millions of small and medium size enterprises throughout the world.

Clearly, Russia puts great strategic importance on its gold reserves. Both President Putin and Prime Minister Medvedev have been photographed on  numerous occasions holding gold bars and coins as a display of economic stability and strength. Since early 2007 Russia has sold gold only twice, in 2012, in small amounts.

Many analysts believe the officially reported 1,660 tonnes to be an understatement given the enormous volumes of gold that have been passing through Hong Kong - and through Shanghai in more recent years - and the large amounts that have been produced and bought domestically.

It is important to remember that as we have long pointed out two other entities, besides the PBOC, have also been buying gold - the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and the China Investment Corporation (CIC).

In what looked like another successful bid to manipulate the gold market lower, there was massive selling of gold futures contracts - some 700,000 ounces worth of gold futures in mere seconds. The equivalent of one-fifth of a whole day’s trade in a normal session, was sold in a concentrated manner in less than two minutes - pushing prices lower again.

Western countries are increasingly displaying symptoms of instability as described by Nassim Taleb, the author of the The Black Swan, ever since the publication of an essay written with Gregory Treverton entitled “The Calm Before the Storm.” The wider public and the press seem unjustifiably complacent at this time. It seems likely that the seemingly unending “recovery” is simply the calm before the storm.

Demand for Silver Eagles spiked in the first week of this month leading the U.S. Mint to run out of its entire August inventory of coins. This coincided with a counter-intuitive 3.8% plunge in price last Monday. It would appear that prices are being forced down. This is likely being done to scare investors away in order to protect some large banks who are net short silver - and for whom a surge in price would be damaging - and possibly to facilitate large unknown entities to accumulate large volumes of silver at a knockdown prices.

The Fed’s Stanley Fischer has said that the U.S. was preparing such legislation – after Tucker had indicated that such legislation was in place. The EU is also at an advanced stage in forcing countries to ratify bail-in legislation. The legislation is being devised to protect the larger banks against the interest of both depositors, taxpayers and the wider economy.