Has the collapse begun? Is paper gold selling in a panic to buy physical?

[Large Sarge]

well, JPM has almost no physical gold left at the COMEX, coincidence?

[Large Sarge]

FWIW, I think we are near a major inflection/tipping point, global demand for gold/silver is insatiable....

World war 3 is ready to really blow

Stock market setting all time records, in defiance of anything sane

money printing like no tomorrow

now the discovery that ther eis no gold in those allocated accounts

Dutch bank default on Gold,

Swiss Bank default on gold,


all these things that politicians and bankers have "kicked down the road" for years on end, well the road has finally stopped

I think oddly enough, Bix Weir might finally be right, and May might be the pivotal month for the last 50 years

[Libertarian_Guard]

FWIW, I think we are near a major inflection/tipping point, global demand for gold/silver is insatiable....

World war 3 is ready to really blow

Stock market setting all time records, in defiance of anything sane

money printing like no tomorrow

now the discovery that ther eis no gold in those allocated accounts

Dutch bank default on Gold,

Swiss Bank default on gold,


all these things that politicians and bankers have "kicked down the road" for years on end, well the road has finally stopped

I think oddly enough, Bix Weir might finally be right, and May might be the pivotal month for the last 50 years

So what do you think LS, another two or three weeks?

[mamboni]

FWIW, I think we are near a major inflection/tipping point, global demand for gold/silver is insatiable....

World war 3 is ready to really blow

Stock market setting all time records, in defiance of anything sane

money printing like no tomorrow

now the discovery that ther eis no gold in those allocated accounts

Dutch bank default on Gold,

Swiss Bank default on gold,


all these things that politicians and bankers have "kicked down the road" for years on end, well the road has finally stopped

I think oddly enough, Bix Weir might finally be right, and May might be the pivotal month for the last 50 years

-"Difficult to predict, always in motion the future is"

-Yoda

[Large Sarge]

So what do you think LS, another two or three weeks?

I think something happens before June, as far as what? Hard to tell, that Fed interview (Fischer) with santelli, he said we are in uncharted waters, and we have no way home...

someone once said Gold is like a barometer, to the health of the monetary/financial system,

kind of like the temperature gauge or oil pressure gauge in your car. So, rather than let the gauge signal a problem, they have jimmied all the gauges to show "everything is fine", including this rising stock market.

So, just like your car that is overheating, and running on no oil, barreling down the highway doing 90 mph, and its making some funny noises, and you smell smoke, but all the gauges say everything is fine....

something is going to give,

the fact that they are starting world war 3 shows they know the game is almost over...

notice how the indian govt keeps trying to cool off physical demand for gold,


I am not sure, there are so many things screwed up now....

I always thought it would be physical silver that defaulted,

I say something gives before June, World war 3, a major default, bank collapse/holiday, something is going to give

[Large Sarge]

paper gold market is dying, another article


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...aper-gold-scam

[mamboni]

The dollar – and the USA – is toast

Exclusive: Lord Monckton sees China prepping for final collapse of America
Published: 1 day ago

Lord Monckton About | Email | Archive

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, high priest of climate skepticism, advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote leaders for the Yorkshire Post, was editor of the Catholic paper The Universe, managing editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, assistant editor of Today, and consulting editor of the Evening Standard. He invented the million-selling "Eternity Puzzles," "Sudoku X" and a promising treatment for infections. See the Science & Public Policy Institute.

Obama has done it. He has brought America down. It only took him just over four years. The Republicans could have stopped him. They didn’t.

How did the nihilistic left succeed in destroying America? Simple. They learned just a little of the capitalism they hate, and they drove your nation into outright bankruptcy.

And here is what the GOP has to say about it: just about nothing.

The once-mighty United States is now the most indebted nation on Earth. In round numbers, here are just some of the vital statistics as the patient dies:

National debt: $17 trillion, or $50,000 per man, woman and child, or $150,000 per taxpayer. Annual federal deficit: $1 trillion. Medicare/Medicaid/Obama”care”: $1 trillion a year. Social Security: another $1 trillion a year. Defense: two-thirds of a trillion. Unemployment handouts: $2 billion per working day. Debt interest: $1 billion per working day. Federal pensions, ditto.

Now for the big numbers. Your government’s Social Security liability is as big as the national debt: $17 trillion. Its prescription drug liability is $22 trillion. Then there’s the Medicare liability of $86 trillion. Total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government are $125 trillion.

Net assets for each U.S. citizen are $300,000. The net liability of the U.S. government, shared among its citizens, amounts to almost four times that: $1.1 million a head. And the government’s debt is growing at $1 million every 45 seconds. To cover its annual deficit, it is printing $1 trillion a year of currency that is not backed by any asset whatsoever.
Here is what will happen next. When the crash comes, don’t say you weren’t given fair and clear warning.
First, the dollar will cease – no, make that “is already ceasing” – to be the world’s reserve currency. China, as I have been warning you she would, has realized the dollar is finished. So she is quietly making startling progress with bilateral and multilateral deals to replace the dollar with the yuan as the world’s currency of choice.

Sterling, once the world’s reserve currency, went precisely the same way in 1967 under orders from Moscow, which then largely controlled the governing Socialist Labor party in Britain.

After the Second World War, the Socialist/Communist governments of Attlee and Wilson bankrupted Britain with health-care and welfare programs and nationalization of industries. Inflation rose to 27 percent.

Obama’s copycat policies are different in only one respect. Moscow is no longer calling the shots. International totalitarianism no longer needs direction. Its cruel, hate-filled, destructive mission now advances on autopilot.

Watch some of the straws in the wind. China and Korea have come to a little-noticed agreement that international trade between them will no longer be denominated in U.S. dollars, but in yuan, or Won.

Behind the closed mahogany doors of the world’s finance houses, elaborate and secret preparations are being made for the upheaval and international financial collapse that will follow the deliberate printing-out and consequent implosion of the dollar.
Your GOP representatives should be, but are not, asking the administration to reveal to them the ever-tougher terms on which the Chinese continue – with ever-greater reluctance –to lend money to keep their communist ally in the White House afloat.
Do not believe China cannot afford to let her biggest creditor fail. She can, she will, and she is making careful preparations to do just that.

If you thought the crash of 2008 was bad, think again. The crash that is coming –I cannot put a date on it, but it is not far away now – will be orders of magnitude worse.

So, what should you do to protect yourself and your family? First, get rid of every dollar you have. Dollars are now all but worthless. When the crash comes, they will have no value at all.

In hard times, most financial instruments – currencies, stocks, bonds – are not worth the paper they are printed on. Get rid of them now. Buy silver coins. They will quintuple in price once the crash sets in, and they are small enough to be fungible when the dollar dies.

Buy land, some of it well-wooded, some of it arable, some of it grassland. You will need the timber to power your steam tractor. Gasoline will be a costly rarity. And make sure you can defend yourselves. Starving mobs are no respecters of persons. Do what the Mormons do: Get three months’ supply of imperishable foodstuffs and hide them in the basement.

Absurd though this advice may now seem, there is a real danger that the crash will sudden. If so – perhaps for several months, and even for years – the fabric of civilization, including the food-supply chain, will fail.

It is not my custom to write in millenarian or apocalyptic terms. But the very best that can be said for your current administration is that it simply has no idea what damage it is doing. It is printing money in the vain hope of buying itself time. Yet every fake dollar that comes off the printing-presses makes the problem worse and the solution harder.

At worst, what is now happening to your nation may be deliberate. In that event, your current “president” will go down as history’s greatest villain. In any event, he will go down as history’s greatest incompetent.

Do not believe none of this can happen. Psychiatrists study what they call “normalcy bias.” People expect that everything will carry on and that America is too big to fail. She is not. She has failed. You will pay a heavy price for her failure, unless you act now to defend yourselves against what your government, with the culpable, silent acquiescence of the GOP, is doing to destroy your nation.

Finally, pray. God bless America. It has been nice knowing you. Only when you are gone will the world realize how much it misses you, and – paradoxically – how much it owes you.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/the-dollar-and-the-usa-is-toast/#8ouJ7IwGxWuLrcGh.99

[mamboni]

Why There May Be a Lot Less Gold than We Realize

Chris Martenson, Cofounder, Peak Prosperity
May 8, 2013 5:37pm



Exactly How Much Gold Do We Have?

There's growing concern that a lot of official gold has been leased out into the market and that sooner or later, as happened back in the late 1990s, one or more parties, perhaps bullion banks or a metals exchange, would run into difficulty trying to meet a physical gold delivery commitment.

For a short video on the mechanics of gold leasing, click here.

If a lot of gold has been leased out, someday it will have to be rebought, and difficulties may emerge if the gold cannot be rebought in sufficient quantities without creating mayhem within the financial system by causing a very large hike in the price of gold.
Important: The amounts of gold leased by central banks is a very closely guarded secret, and we do not have direct information on them, which means we have to try and back-calculate these amounts by other means.

A recent and thought-provoking study regarding gold leasing was done by Sprott Asset Management in March. After accounting for all known flows of gold into and out of the US over the past 22 years, the Sprott team arrived at a figure of nearly 4,500 tonnes of gold that cannot be accounted for.

Here's the summary flow chart:

http://d1w116sruyx1mf.cloudfront.net...0508image1.jpg(Source)

In short, because gold is not consumed and never misplaced, there has to be a balance between gold supply and demand. It cannot be printed out of thin air, and it is this inconvenient fact that really matters the most here.

One caveat: Because of the explosive nature of the above findings, Adam and I sought out an opposing view. We talked with a managing partner at an NYC commodity firm that tracks and reports on gold and silver as specialty areas, and their view was that the US has actually been a net importer over the same time period. I could not resolve the massive discrepancy between these views, so I have more research to do. When asked directly how the US government's own import-export data could be this far off the mark, the response was that gold is only counted if it is in wrought form, meaning that it has been fashioned into bars, coins, rods, etc. Uncomfortable with the implication that the US had somehow imported 4,500 tonnes of unwrought gold – that is, gold in the form of dust, pellets, or gold ore – I asked if it was realistic that unwrought gold along could account for so many missing tonnes. The response left me with plenty of doubts. So more digging is required.


Presumably this gold came from leasing arrangements and from official sources, as there are no private suppliers that could possibly match these enormous amounts. Further, it should be noted that one very important missing value in this flow chart is private investment – such as gigantic hedge funds buying gold, or you or I buying coins – which means that the actual shortfall would be higher than 4,500 tonnes, because private investment subtracts tonnage from the amount available for export.

Depending on how much private demand you estimate (and it has been considerable over the past 13 years), you might double the shortfall or perhaps even go higher.

There's really no other possible source for that gold than from "official" sources, meaning the Fed and/or the Treasury. The only other explanation is that thousands and thousands of tonnes of gold somehow got into this country without being detected by US trade and customs officials, which implies that a rather large series of crimes had to be committed.

Because I almost completely discount the idea of illicit gold imports being of a material size, that just leaves us to try and figure out how much leasing the Fed and the Treasury have supported over the prior decades, as we will see below.

The facts are easy enough to grasp. The US has exported vastly more gold than it has imported, and that gold had to come from somewhere. It is very doubtful that accounting errors can explain away even 1% of this discrepancy.

This leaves gold-leasing from the Fed as the most likely source for all that gold, and it is such a large amount that I know of no possible source on the face of the planet where such an amount could be purchased. This is why Germany seeking to repatriate their gold is such a big deal. What if that gold has already been loaned out?

To put it mildly, any whiff that the world's central-bank gold is not where people think it is would really be an enormously unsettling admission to have to make.


Another caveat: There are other experts out there who dispute the figures of this Sprott study. I'm in contact with one of them, probably the best-credentialed of the bunch. If I receive data contradicting Sprott's analysis, I'll present it in a subsequent post here on the site.

Where It Came From

In the meantime, let's play a game here. Suppose for the sake of argument that the US is missing 4,500 tonnes of gold that has been leased out, and it's time to either admit that it's been lost to the world or get it back somehow. That is, the bullion banks will have to pay back the gold they borrowed with cash, or come up with the gold.

How much are we talking about? In current terms of ~$1,380 per ounce, those 4,500 tonnes of missing gold pencil out to a liability of some $200 billion. While the Fed might decide that it is able and willing to forgo its gold and allow the bullion banks to deliver cash instead of physical to avoid their probable failure, the Fed does not own that much gold to deliver. Not even close.

If you look at the Fed's balance sheet, they claim to have ~$11 billion in gold (listed as an asset, by the way), but that number is a historical aberration. The Federal Reserve, just like the Treasury Department, carries gold on its books at the rate of $42.22, a price set way back in the 1930s and not touched since.

This means the Fed has, on its books as an asset, some 261 million ounces of gold, or more than 8,000 tonnes of gold.

The Federal Reserve Balance Sheethttp://d1w116sruyx1mf.cloudfront.net...0508image2.jpg(Source)

If you do the math, that $11.041 billion in "gold stock" works out to 261 million ounces of gold, or more than 8,000 tonnes. That's a nice pile and more than enough to forgo the return of 4,500 tonnes, right?

Not so fast. Those 261 million ounces of gold actually belong to the US Treasury.

Quite confusingly, both the Fed and the Treasury claim this same reserve amount of gold on their balance sheets, an accounting mystery that I have not resolved to my complete satisfaction. (I have heard that the Fed's balance sheet has an offsetting liability, though I have yet to locate it). Here's the current report of US gold holdings put out by the Treasury:

http://d1w116sruyx1mf.cloudfront.net...0508image3.jpg(Source)

See? There are those same 261 million ounces of gold listed for the identical $11.041 billion. So who really owns it? Well, that's another mystery to be resolved on another day. For now, let's just try to figure out where the 4,500 tonnes of gold came from before we worry about the claims and responsibilities of actual ownership.

The main point I want to make here is that if 4,500 tonnes has been leased out by the Federal Reserve, it could not have been done without the Federal Reserve leasing out either gold belonging to the US Treasury (i.e., US citizens) or belonging to other countries for whom the Fed is holding gold "in custody."

How can I be sure? Because the Fed does not have any other gold listed anywhere else on its balance sheet. If it's holding some as an asset, it's hiding it, and I just don't think that's the case. The Fed is holding a lot of gold for other countries as a custodian, but that's a liability of the Fed, not an asset.

So the conclusion is simple enough: The Fed has leased out the gold of US citizens, other countries, or both. One other possibility is that the Treasury Department did it directly, but they, to my knowledge, have never been involved in gold leasing, nor have I heard even the first hint of rumor that they might have been involved. Any gold leased into the market belonging to the US Treasury was almost certainly conducted via the Federal Reserve.

I would presume that if the Fed has lent out a lot of Uncle Sam's gold, that had to have been done with the full knowledge of the Treasury Department, because that gold could only have come from the so-called "deep storage" category, which means either the Fort Knox, Denver, or West Point vaults.

Recently, there was a big splashy show of claiming that the United States' gold had been audited. Not only was it all there, we were told, but we learned it was more pure than previously thought! Carefully read the below article and see what impressions are created for you:


Gold at NY Fed Is Intact, Some Purer than Thought, Audit Finds
Feb 13, 2013


NEW YORK – The U.S. government's gold in New York is safe in a vault underneath Manhattan, and some of the precious metal there is purer than previously thought.
That's according to a first-ever audit conducted last year by the Treasury Department of U.S. gold on deposit at Federal Reserve banks in New York and elsewhere.
The New York Fed holds 99.98% of the U.S.-owned gold bars and coins in the custody of the Federal Reserve. The rest of the gold is on display at Fed banks in cities such as Richmond, Kansas City and San Francisco.



If you came away with the impression that 99.98% of all the United States' gold was audited and 1) found to be there and 2) found to be in even better shape than originally thought, then congratulations are in order to whomever wrote those careful, slippery words.
The truth is that the Fed only holds 13.4 million ounces of the Treasury's physical gold (see image above of Treasury gold) out of some 261.5 million ounces – just about 5%. So the more accurate sentence would have read: "The New York Fed holds 5% of the US-owned gold bars and coins, and these were fully accounted for in our recent audit. The other 95% has not been fully audited in decades." Not quite as impressive-sounding, is it?

So the audit confirmed that at least 5% of the nation's gold is safe and sound. But that's all we know. Because every audit request by former Congressman Ron Paul to check in on the gold held in deep storage has been utterly rebuffed. No such audit has been conducted by an independent third party in many decades. So we really don't know. But we are still left with Sprott's unexplained data showing that the US has exported 4,500 tonnes more than it has imported, and perfectly sane logic leads us to conclude it had to have come from the Fed, the Treasury, or both.

Now, suppose again that the 4,500 tonnes are missing and that either an audit or a collapse in the bullion-leasing game would reveal as much. If you were in charge of that potentially nightmarish scenario, what would you do? If it were my job, I would do everything possible to scare that gold back into the markets where I could purchase it, preferably at a cheap rate and on the sly, with the hopes that I could get that done before anybody was any the wiser.

The alternative – a breakdown in the gold delivery market – would create massive price spikes, panic, immediate demands by other central banks for their gold, and quite possibly a lot of financial instability at a very, very vulnerable time in financial history. I should remark that there's never really a good time for such an event, but now would be especially poor timing, given the state of things.

If indeed the US is short 4,500 tonnes (or 145 million ounces), then for every dollar that the price of gold is dropped, $145 million of potential losses are avoided on the repurchase of the leased gold.

This could be the story of the decade, maybe century, if the Sprott data is remotely accurate. If it is, then when all of this has to finally be undone, my prediction is that agreements will be broken, allies will be stiffed, and the Fed will not willingly part with whatever gold actually remains, no matter who thinks they own it (Germany, et al.) or how many times Bernanke says that the Fed holds it merely out of tradition. The level of secrecy surrounding gold, gold leasing, and the complete lack of a full audit of deep-storage gold all suggest there's something to hide here – not the opposite.

There's an awful lot of smoke out there right now, and the concerted US public relations campaign to convince the world that gold is useless strikes me as both strident and desperate.
Conclusion

Again, if the Sprott analysis is accurate, there's a lot of missing gold in the US equation, and it had to come from official sources, either of US origin or belonging to other countries. Either way, the leased gold represents a tremendous liability of the Fed and the bullion banks to which it was loaned.

In this context, the gold slam begins to smell like an operation designed to shake as much gold as possible out of weak hands so that the bullion banks can begin to recover it to square up their accounts. GLD, the gold ETF that so many small investors participate in, is one large, obvious target, as it was sitting on 1,350 tonnes as of January 2013. The most recent figure I have shows that GLD has coughed up close to 175 tonnes and will certainly lose more in the coming days, as long as the price of gold is held down or even dropped further.
But even if GLD loses it all, that won't even cover a third of lowest possible estimate of the US shortfall. And we can be sure that other central banks in the UK and European arena have played similar games, so there will certainly be some competition for every tonne of gold that is released.

It is my distinct impression that something is very wrong behind the scenes, and I am about as worried now as I have ever been. But I'm also excited because it means that finally some interesting things are about to happen. The long, boring quiet period in the markets, where the price of everything was manipulated or distorted by official actions and volatility was managed down to unbelievably low levels, is probably over.
This is good news because it means that markets might again be able to function more normally and give us useful information and price signals that can help us determine which direction to go in.

Along with this feeling of unease, one line of thinking I have is that gold and silver are getting closer to the day when you or I will not be able to purchase physical bullion at any price. Were a major bullion bank to openly renege on its lease commitments, or the LBMA or COMEX were to declare force majeure and fail to deliver physical, all domestic stocks of gold and silver bullion would evaporate for all practical purposes.
When queried about what would happen if even 10% of the US population decided to access the physical bullion market, one large dealer told us it would just break the system. It's a very narrow pipeline that delivers relatively few rounds, bars, and coins to a very small population of bullion holders. Any big flood and the 5-6 week wait times we now see will certainly get longer. Not many dealers and/or wholesalers will want to honor such long lead times when/if prices are volatile or skyrocketing higher.

Where there's smoke there's fire, and there is a lot of smoke in the bullion world right now. I am more certain than ever that holding physical bullion is a must-do for everyone who wishes to preserve their purchasing power.

I am not yet issuing an Alert on this matter, but I am wrestling very hard with the urge to do so. I need some more hard information to justify such a drastic step, but for now my gut is telling me that something is about to break open.

More to come as this fast-breaking situation develops.


Chris Martenson

http://www.caseyresearch.com/article...han-we-realize

[Half Sense]

What could happen is that the countries like Germany once they get shafted out of their gold by Uncle Sam could go after private owners of gold, concluding that Germany's gold had to go SOMEWHERE, and maybe it was used to make Gold Eagles...so all holders of Gold Eagles are actually illegal holders of Germany's sovereign gold. Or something like that. Hell, it's likely the Feds will tell Germany that's EXACTLY what happened to their gold.

[mamboni]

What could happen is that the countries like Germany once they get shafted out of their gold by Uncle Sam could go after private owners of gold, concluding that Germany's gold had to go SOMEWHERE, and maybe it was used to make Gold Eagles...so all holders of Gold Eagles are actually illegal holders of Germany's sovereign gold. Or something like that. Hell, it's likely the Feds will tell Germany that's EXACTLY what happened to their gold.

Don't forget about gold teeth.