Tungsten-Filled 1 Kilo Gold Bar Found In The UK

The last time a story of Tungsten-filled gold appeared on the scene was just two years ago, and involved a 500  gram bar of gold full of tungsten, at the W.C. Heraeus foundry, the world's largest metal refiner and fabricator. It also became known that said "gold" bar originated from an unnamed bank. It is now time to rekindle the Tungsten Spirits with a report from ABC Bullion of Australia, which provides photographic evidence of a new gold bar that has been drilled out and filled with tungsten rods, this time not in Germany but in an unnamed city in the UK, where it was intercepted by a scrap metals dealer, and was supplied with its original certificate. The reason the bar attracted attention is that it was 2 grams underweight. Upon cropping it was uncovered that about 30-40% of the bar weight was tungsten. So two documented incidents in two years: isolated? Or indication of the same phenomenon of precious metal debasement that marked the declining phase of the Roman empire. Only then it was relatively public for anyone who cared to find out on their own. Now, with the bulk of popular physical gold held in top secret, private warehouses around the world, where it allegedly backs the balance sheets of the world's central banks, yet nobody can confirm its existence, nor audit the actual gold content, it is understandable why increasingly more are wondering: just how much gold is there? And alongside that - while gold, (or is it GLD?), can be rehypothecated, can one do the same with tungsten?

Europe Is Heading For a Crisis in May-June 

Posted by: Phoenix Capital...

Post date: 03/24/2012 - 12:50

I firmly believe we will see Europe start to crumble during the May-June window of time. We have a confluence of political (French, Greece, Irish elections), fundamental, seasonal, technical, and...

 

How Housing Affordability Can Falter Even as House Prices Decline

Those snapping up housing for cash are either buying to rent the homes or to speculate that a resurgent housing market will arise and they can "flip" for big profits. This segment simply isn't large enough to soak up all the millions of homes languishing in the "shadow inventory" of homes being held off the market in the vain hope prices will bubble higher. The general idea of lower home prices is that once prices fall to some magic threshold, buyers will jump in and liquidate the inventory. That notion makes two enormous assumptions: 1) Interest rates will stay near-zero when inflation is factored in. 2) Household income will stop declining. In other words, there are three inputs to housing affordability, and price is only one of them. Interest rates and disposable income are equally important.

JP Morgan Finds Obama, And US Central Planning, Has Broken The Economic "Virtuous Cycle"

In the last few months we have presented various analyses, both ours and those of Goldman and even Jon Hilsenrath, on why one of the core economic empirical relationships: Okun's law, is now broken. Subsequently we presented another parallel line of inquiry - namely that in order to preserve the illusion of a recovery, the Obama administration (with help from the Fed) has engaged in a quality-for-quantity job transfer, where America is creating increasingly more jobs of lower quality (the bulk of which are part-time), which in turn is leading to less proportional personal income tax revenues, and thus to a secular shift in an indicator which is even more important for US economic growth than simply the number of jobs "gained" each month - labor productivity. Today, JPM's Michael Feroli ties these two perspectives together in an analysis that has extremely damning implications for the US, and global, economic growth prospects. In a nutshell, Feroli finds that "Productivity, which used to be procyclical, has now turned countercyclical" which in turn means that "if labor is no longer a quasi-fixed factor of production this may eliminate one type of non-convexity in production, thereby reducing the likelihood that the economy has multiple equilibria and is subject to self-fulfilling prophecies" or said somewhat simpler: "the conditions for self-fulfilling prophesies in the macroeconomy may no longer exist." Still confused: central planning, and the Obama vote grab has killed the "virtuous cycle"... Which in turn means that everything America is trying to accomplish is now a lost cause, as every incremental dollar spent, whether by fiscal and monetary policy, is pursuing an outcome that is now theoretically and practically impossible to achieve!

Homer Simpson's Markets and "Fixed Income" Ideas

Just this week we had: TVIX, MF Global & “customer money”, CPDO, Greek CDS auction, BATS.... I’m all for some complexity and innovation, but it does seem after a week like this, that the financial markets have become too complex, and some real effort should be made to simplify things and put everyone on an even playing field.

Charting Last Week's Changes In Speculative Exposure

For those interested in what vile plans the evil, evil speculators were hatching in the last week (and historically) because as everyone indoctrinaged by the mainstream media knows it is all their fault gas is now over $4.00, not the Chairsatan's, nor was it his fault we had a housing or credit bubble - his own words from the second GW lecture - here is a complete breakdown of all relevant time series from the most recent Committment of Traders report.

Gretchen Morgenson: Wall Street Really Does Enjoy A Different Set of Rules Than The Rest of Us

Gretchen Morgenson has earned a Pulitzer-winning career from exposing abuse and conflicts of interest on Wall Street. In this interview, she confirms that there is indeed a second set of rules that our elite financial institutions enjoy, largely unfettered by the constraints that apply to the rest of us. Consequences for failure and fraud are very different under this second set of rules - in fact, they're practically rewarded.  Accountability, by all prudent measures, has become non-existent. The extraordinary measures the country deployed to deal with the great contraction in 2008 only served to exacerbate these imbalances. What's sorely needed now is a national dialogue on whether we're willing to allow this to continue. What benefits are we receiving by enabling these elite to enjoy such different standards? What type of system and rules might work better for our interests? Sadly, beyond the disorganized OWS outrage that has waned in visibility, there is no real cogent, organized public debate focused on this right now. A big reason is that Washington is actively avoiding such a dialogue. It was fundamentally complicit in creating the underlying factors resulting in the '08 collapse and it doesn't want brighter light helping the public understand that more clearly.

‘Don’t Attack Iran!’ Nationwide Anti-War Protest Held in UK

Mike Maloney With Christian Garcia GoldSilver.Com – What’S Going On?

 

The Petro Dollar Discussion

Part 1

 

The new black gold: U.S. farmland.

 

 

Its A Dead-Man-Walking Economy 

 

 

a very useful piece of freeware called Do Not Track + 

 

 

Americans Asleep At The Wheel Driving Into Debt Slavery



Bernanke Says Higher Energy Prices Constitute A Threat To The US Economy

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