“Marc Faber, managing director and founder of Marc Faber Ltd., and Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, discuss the state of the Chinese economy and the outlook for the U.S. stock market with Trish Regan on Bloomberg Television’s ‘Street Smart.'”
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2014-05-22/marc-faber-i-will-never-sell-my-gold
“A U.K. financial regulator has fined Barclays (BCS) $43.8 million after it accused a former trader at the bank of improperly influencing gold prices. The British bank will be fined £26 million ($43.8 million) for failures that allowed trader Daniel James Plunkett to exploit the weaknesses in Barclays’ systems and controls to seek to influence the price of gold, which allowed the firm to ‘profit at a customer’s expense,’ according to a news release. The fine was handed down by the Financial Conduct Authority. Separately, Plunkett was fined £95,600, or about $161,000.”
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/23/barclays-fined-44-million-over-gold-price-fixing/
“This attempt to crush popular demand for gold merely resulted in soaring and increasingly more ingenious attempts to smuggle gold into the country, which however do not register in the official data, and as such, the government no longer has an accurate perspective of what true capital flows look like. However, the current regime of gold demand suppression may be ending soon, and all the demand for gold may soon bubble right back to the surface. Reuters reports that the Reserve Bank of India and finance ministry officials will recommend that the new government relax strict gold import rules to head off a surge in illegal buying, officials with direct knowledge of the plan said.”
“The company that runs the London silver fixing, a benchmark dating back more than a century, will stop running the process after Deutsche Bank AG said two weeks ago that it was dropping out of the price-setting ritual. The London Silver Market Fixing Ltd. will stop administering the fixing on Aug. 14, it said today in a statement. Regulators have been stepping up their scrutiny of how gold and silver prices are set in the wake of the London interbank offered rate-manipulation scandal. The FCA is visiting member banks involved in the gold fixing as part of its review of gold benchmarks. Deutsche Bank has said it is leaving fixings as it scales back its commodities business.”
“As per the report, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) had filed 40 gold smuggling cases in the last year whereas it has increased to 148 cases in the past 12 months. The aggregate value of the seized illegal gold from 464 people in 2013-14 is es at Rs 245 crore. Most of the gold smugglers are arrested from the nation’s international airports. The customs officials at the Indira Gandhi International Airport said that they have nabbed 353 kg of gold worth at Rs 90 crore in this current financial year whereas it was 20-25 kg of gold in the last year. India had witnessed a dangerous increase of CAD to $88.2 billion which is about 4.7% of the country’s GDP in the year 2012-2013.”
http://www.scrapmonster.com/news/gold-smuggling-in-india-spikes-446-in-last-12-months/1/12756
“Underneath the headlines lies an irreparable situation with the PGM (Platinum Group Metals) market, one that will last at least several years and probably more like a decade. This market is teetering on the edge of a supply crunch, one more perilous than many investors realize. As the issues outlined below play out, prices will be forced higher—which signals that we should diversify into the ‘other’ precious metals now. The basic problem is that platinum and palladium supply is in a structural deficit. It won’t be resolved when the strikes end or Russia simmers down. Here are six reasons why.”
http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/the-birth-of-a-new-bull-market
“The chief reasons platinum and palladium are in a structural supply deficit are: A: As I mentioned last week, the ore grade of the platinum group metals, that is the amount of the metals found in ore, is declining rapidly, with a plunge of more than 50 percent in ore grades in Russia and South Africa combined since 1998. B. It takes as long as 10 years to open a new mine. C. Inventories are already being squeezed, with platinum demand expected to exceed available supplies this year by 705,000 ounces, while palladium demand is expected to exceed supplies by a huge 959,000 ounces this year, more than double the official 455,000 ounce deficit in 2013.”
http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/the-biggest-factor-in-the-platinum-and-palladium-markets-61227
“For 173 years, the United States used money as a medium of exchange. In 1965, it switched to using a floating accounting unit. This change coincided with a dramatic yet hidden reversal in the net trend of worth for U.S. corporations. The shift to fake money in 1965 just happens to coincide with the year that divides the long term trend of corporate worth in the United States from mostly up to mostly down. This chart reveals the breathtaking rise in total U.S. corporate worth during the money period and exposes the stunning net destruction of U.S. corporate worth since the start of the non-money period.”
“Many don’t realize that you can easily own gold internationally inside of a pre-existing IRA. And you don’t even have to convert it into a self-directed IRA (although this is something all should consider) to do so. The Hard Assets Alliance (HAA) is the only group I know of offering the ability to own gold, stored internationally, inside a pre-existing IRA without having to go through the process of a self-directed IRA in an easy fashion. The process to set up a Precious Metals IRA has traditionally been slow and cumbersome. But the HAA has put the custodian, the dealer and the storage facility together under one roof and vastly simplified a process that traditionally took 30-45 days.”