Bits and Pieces 29thMar13

  • The BRICS nations, 43 percent of the world’s population, are working on a new “development bank” set to bypass the World Bank and the IMF.

“There’s a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world.”

The move is seen as a way for BRICS to protect themselves from the US and Europe’s financial trouble and as a way to increase their global financial influence.

Details here  and here.

  • Russia to ban cash transactions over $10,000
  • Bitcoin’s market capitalization briefly hits $1Billion!
  • Texas want’s its gold back from the Fed.

 

Bitcoin & The Banking System: Not Just Different, But Entirely Incompatible

Commercial banking is a money making endeavour; literally.  Sure there’s a complex set of rules, but the short story is commercial banks create money. A button is pressed and congratulations, your loan has been approved and $50k of brand new digital Dollars are now sitting in your bank account.

As you might imagine, creating new money is a very handy little trick for banks. In fact, the commercial banking business model is dependent on the variable nature of national fiat currencies which makes this possible.  But this trick only works on fiat currencies, replace the US Dollar with Bitcoins, and the banking system as we know it today ceases to exist.

Continue reading

The Price of Gold

“Owning physical gold is like having a put option on your government and the financial system. And when you don’t have confidence in these things, the paper price of a gold contract that trades in a government-regulated commodities exchange is… irrelevant.” An important reminder from the SovereignMan.

The price of gold has taken a hit in the last few weeks dipping down to the $1,500’s. If you own gold and silver as ‘a put option on the financial system’ this temporary dip is of little concern, what you own is real money. And this week Patrick Barron explained why it is the dollar and not gold that is overvalued.

Continue reading

The Treasury writes a report on its accounting practices

This would be a more appropriate description of the recent reports on the Treasury’s “gold audit”.

The ‘audit’ appears to have been mostly an accounting review. It largely covers reliability of financial reporting, and compliance with applicable laws and regulations and is titled “Audit of the Department of the Treasury’s Schedule of United States Gold Reserves Held by Federal Reserve Banks as of September 30, 2012”

Continue reading

GoldMoney: QE for dummies

The Banking/Monetary system is both staggeringly simple, they push a button to create new money, and ridiculously complex, fractional reserve ratios, treasury bonds, interest rates, open market operations, M1, M2, etc.

In a new GoldMoney post PeakProsperity.com’s  Chris Martenson helps to explain one part of this bizarre system, Quantitative Easing.

“Despite its sophisticated-sounding name, QE is nothing more complicated than the Fed buying ‘assets’ from commercial banks and other private financial institutions. I put assets in quotes because the Fed does not buy things like land, Stradivarius violins, diamonds, gold, or silver from these institutions, but rather various forms of debt.”

Continue reading

Jim Sinclair sees German gold repatriation as ‘beginning of the end’ for US dollar

The Silver Doctors have posted an email from Jim Sinclair sent to his subscribers. In the email he compares the reports of Bundesbank’s repatriation of its gold holdings from the Fed to Charles De Gaulle ‘calling the hand’ of the US its obligation to convert French held dollars into gold.

History will look back on this salvo fired across US war financing as being the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the reserve currency of choice.”

Today’s report, if true, is a salvo fired at the concept that the USA has all the gold it claims and all the gold it stores for others. If true, this event is the most important gold development since Charles De Gaulle called the US hand that it would stand by convertibility which many then assumed it could not because even then the amount of gold held was publicly questioned.”

Read the email here.

Austrian Economist and Former Mises Institute President Makes the Case for Innovation in Currencies

Doug French is Senior Editor at Laissez Faire Club and a former President of the Mises Institute. In a new post he supports “Currencies of the Future” (i.e. Bitcoin) and argues that “The answer to the currency question may not be to reform government” but instead to make “an end run around the government’s iron grip on the monetary system.”

Continue reading