Gold

July 24th: The Day China Reveals Gold’s Real Price
The Jay Martin Show

Jay gives a good explanation of what was going on back in the 1960s when Nixon canceled gold's fixed price. The part about the floor of the vault in England collapsing is pure fiction, or at least I wasn't able to confirm it. 

He has a good section about inflation starting just at 11:08.

The part about China building big bank vaults in Hong Kong seems legit.

I suspect the main reason governments want to have a big stock pile of gold had got nothing to do with monty. It's so that when they feel like throwing their weight around, they have some weight to throw, and nothing throws weight better than gold.

1935 Renault Celtaquatre by Ermell

1935 Renault Celtaquatre by Ermell

Renault made 44,000 of these cars between 1934 and 1938. The engine produced 34 horsepower. It sold for $1,100 when gold was $35 an ounce. In 1964 gold was still $35 an ounce and new American car cost $2,000, so this Renault was really cheap. In 1934 this Renault would have been worth two pounds of gold. Two pounds of gold today is worth about $100,000 which would allow you to have your pick of a new car.

Crooks: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Crooks: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
TrailerWorlds TV

Our two heroes, Charly and Joseph, are still after THE COIN:

Gold 5 Ruble of Catherine the Great

This time they bounce between Berlin, Austria and Bangkok, where Joseph has some very useless 'friends', to use the term loosely. There are also two rival gangs there who are engaged in mortal combat over a black idol. Back in Vienna, poor, damaged Rio is hopelessly in love with Tamara (of the bright red hair). Rio is trying to get his hands on THE COIN so he can pay off his gambling debts. Mr. A., some kind of Russian mobster, who might be the rightful owner of THE COIN, wants it back. Chaos, including fist fights, kick boxing, stabbings and at least a couple of massive gun fights. We are also treated to Charly picking numerous locks and cracking open at least one safe. It all ends happily enough, with Mr. A. even reconciling with his daughter, who has become the lead in the Bolshoi ballet company.

Season 1 post here.

Gold Noise

Saw this chart from ZeroHedge on feedly and thought 'this looks ominous', but the image was too small to see the numbers clearly, so I opened in a new tab. Now I was able to clearly see the numbers in the enlarged image. 

The gold line is the spot price of gold. The other two lines are some obscure market bullshit, I'm not even going to try and figure out what they are.

Now look at the numbers on the gold scale (2nd from the right). It ranges from $5300 an ounce to $5550, a difference of 4%, not a catastrophic collapse. Now look the time scale along the bottom. It starts at 3:30 AM and runs till 7 AM this morning. That's like ancient history. Gold could be a thousand dollars higher or lower by now.

I suspect anytime you use a microscope to look at any kind of financial market you will find what look like apparent huge leaps in prices. I imagine there are people who thrive on this kind of minutiae but I ain't one of 'em.

The ZeroHedge article is paywalled. I suspect that the feedly link will not work for you.

Gold

A woman holds a 1kg gold bar at the headquarters of the Australian Bullion Company in Sydney [File: Daniel Munoz/Reuters]

Aljazeera: Spot gold price touches an all-time high of $5,110.50 for an ounce in the first hours of the day.

That would make the gold bar in the picture worth $180,000. Back before Nixon, when gold was worth $35 an ounce, this same bar would have been worth $1,200. A few months ago when gold was around $3,000 an ounce, today's dollar was worth one cent from 1963. Now it's only worth 2/3 of one cent. And somehow the U. S. dollar is still the world standard.

1971

WTF happened in 1971? Once we fully ended the gold standard, a LOT of things have went off the rails
jake explains

Joy - o - joy. One of my favorite topics to harp on: gold, inflation and Nixon. Don't know why I bother, it's not like anything substantive is going to change.

Gold

Fort Knox & Secret WW2 British Gold
Mark Felton Productions

War is expensive.

Give Us Back Our Gold! The 80-Year Journey of Poland's WWII Bullion
Mark Felton Productions

I am curious to see what the proposed audit of Fort Knox will show, assuming it even happens. I expect everything will be found to be in order, but I won't be too surprised if it isn't, since the Federal government has been riddled with criminals and corruption for so long.

Alchemy

Western Australian Gold -- Off the Charts! But there's a problem.
Orophilia

Fascinating. This business of extracting gold may as well be black magic. I can understand how chemicals could react and change the contents of a mixture, but how does heating a mixture in a furnace result in all the gold collecting into one small pellet? And what happened to the rest of the mixture? Did the lead evaporate? It's possible, but seems like a bad idea.

Anyway, reminds me of a passage from the 3rd volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, where the nearly dead Isaac Newton is supervising a gold test / measurement operation in the Tower of London. Neal's explanation was detailed and clear, but just like this video, it made no sense.

Treasure

Lightbox Diamond Factory, Gresham, Oregon

At lunch today, Iowa man tells us he has discovered a diamond factory in Gresham, just east of Portland. There is a story in Oregon Live from a few years ago. Who'd a thunk it? (Previous posts about Diamonds.)

I mentioned this video I came across recently. Jack thinks the Federal Reserve Bank in New York's gold bullion hoard is worth more. Let's see:

Gold on hand	6,331	tons
times	2,000	pounds per ton
times	12	ounces per pound
times	2,600	dollars per ounce
equals	395,054,400,000	dollars

Jack is right, 400 billion is more than 10 billion. Of course this depends on the Federal Reserve telling us the truth about how much gold they have and I am not sure I trust them any more than I trust the Federal Government.

In the Netflix series Black Sails, the pirates recover many tons of gold from a wrecked Spanish treasure ship. Gold is heavy, so they convert a portion of it to gemstones which evidently have a higher value to density ration. This seems to like a risky proposition to me. Gold can easily be measured, gemstones need an appraiser both when you buy them and again when you sell them, which means you are at their mercy, that is, if you can even find one. A couple of pounds of gemstones could be worth as much as a ton of gold, so if portability is an issue, then the risk entailed might be worth it. Gemstones have no particular attraction for me. Oh, they are pretty enough, but not they are not pretty enough that I am going to spend a pile of loot to acquire one just so I can look at it. If one did fall into my hands I would probably hang onto it because it is more likely to hold onto its value than anything else. Some people like to have them so they can show them off. I am not one of those people. My wife has to remind me to shave when we are going out.

Jack's sister recently sold a pile of silver coins she inherited from her father. A lump of silver the size of a pack of cigarettes is worth about $1,400. The coin man used the ping test on her coins.

Ping Test for Silver Coins & Bars
SilverCoins.com

Ping test is a good thing to have in your pocket if you are dealing in silver. There are any number of videos talking about the ping test and they are a real grab bag. First problem is that the ping test is not definitive. The second is it can be very hard to tell the difference between a real coin and a fake, especially if you don't have anything to compare it to. Third is that some real coins will fail the test. I picked this one because it's not too long and he just balances the coins on his finger.

Update the next day: changed ounces per pound from 16 to 12 per Stu's comment.

Notes on 'The Commodore' by Patrick O'Brian

Chapter 1

Broad bottomed bottle

Captain Aubrey and his friend Captain Dundas are heading home after long voyages. They are  drinking port from a broad bottomed bottle somewhere between Ushant and the Scilly Isles and are on the point of parting company. Dundas is heading for Portsmouth, Aubrey for Shelmerston and Dr. Maturin is headed for London.

Dundas confesses he is almost certainly going to arrested for debt once he lands at Portsmouth, and asks Aubrey if he could loan him 1,000 guineas. Aubrey, flush with loot from a very successful voyage, readily agrees as he has several hundred pounds of gold and silver on board.

So how much does 1,000 guineas of gold wiegh? Back in 1800 a Guinea was another term for an English pound sterling, one pound was worth $4.44 American and one ounce of gold was worth $20.

One thousand guineas would be worth $4,440, divide that $20 per ounce and we have 222 ounces. Divide that by 16 ounces per pound and we have 13 and 7/8 pounds, which is just shy of one stone (14 pounds). So it's something a man can carry, but you are going to notice the weight.

Given that gold is now somewhere around $2,000 an ounce, one stone of gold would be worth just shy of half a million dollars.

Ushant, the Scilly Isles & The English Channel

Key to Above Map

Just the first few places mentioned in Chapter 1. No matter how many islands I learn about, there is always a new one popping up. I've come across Ushant before (probably in another one of Patrick O'Brian's novels), but I never realized it was an island.

BLOOD & GOLD Trailer (2023) Alexander Scheer, Robert Maaser, Action

Blood & Gold | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

In the closing days of WW2 in Germany, a squad of German soldiers under the command of a demented Nazi SS Officer are searching for a stockpile of gold in a small town. The gold came from a Jewish family that had sold a factory in the early days of the war and were preparing to leave. Those plans collapsed and now everyone is looking for the gold. The Netflix blurb called it Tarantino-esque, and they're spot on. Horrible, vile, bad guys, glorious, heart-of-gold good guys. The bad guys get their just deserts, but only after they have repeatedly demonstrated just how rotten they are, and the good guys get a happy ending.

Update October 2025 replaced missing video.

Russian Gold

Russian Gold Coin

It's kind of cool looking, but it's a little hard to see with the reflection, so I asked Google. Google couldn't identify it. It came up with a bunch of pictures of other Russian gold coins, but not this one.

I'm guessing it's a 50,000 Ruble coin from 2016 which would make it worth about $600, which means it might weigh somewhere between a quarter and a third of an ounce.

More Gold, More Electronic Trash

Tony Beets Buys a Brand New $1.3 Million Bulldozer | Gold Rush: Winter’s Fortune
Discovery UK

Tony hopes to recover 9,000 ounces of gold from the ground he is tearing up. At today's price, 9,000 ounces would be worth $17 million. That would pay for his new toy and then some. Used to be that the D8 was the biggest bulldozer on the block. That was a long time ago. The D9 came around in 1955, the D10 in 1973 and the D11 in 1986. Progress marches on whether you are paying attention or not. At 124 tons, the D11 weighs about twice as much as an Abrams Tank.

How 6 Million Pounds Of Electronic Waste Gets Recycled A Month | Big Business
Business Insider

I don't know who is working harder to get the gold. Previous post on the subject.

Extracting Gold from Old Electronics

How To Mine Gold From Electronics | World Wide Waste
Business Insider

Gold! My mouth salivates at the prospect of getting my hands on some, especially if I can get it for free from old junk. Of course it's not so simple.

Trying to make a living by extracting useful materials from electronic waste is an iffy proposition, if you are just looking at the financial aspect. The 150 grams of gold they are extracting every week using their pilot project is worth about $9,000 (at today's price of $57.58 per gram), which might be enough to pay the bills. Whether it could scale up to make an industrial scale version a viable business is still an open question.

They mention a couple of points that could impact the business:

1. Gold is becoming more difficult to extract from the ground, which should make this bio-recycling more attractive, and
2. Electronics manufacturers are looking for ways to use less gold, which is will make this project less attractive.

They also talk about how recycling methods in third world shit-holes use polluting techniques that are unhealthy for the workers. But these people depend on this wretched business to make a living. Maybe we need to find a way to make those third world shit-holes less shitty. Yeah, good luck with that.

I hate to say it, but maybe we need a disposal tax on all electronics, shoot, for that matter, maybe we need such a tax on all manufactured items. Wouldn't Waste Management, AKA the Mafia, love to get their hands on that kind of revenue stream? You might think it would be a bad idea to let a corrupt organization like the Mafia into a legitimate business, but are they any worse than the jackholes running the highest levels of our federal government?

Jim Puckett (the guy they show in the old, fuzzy video clips) is an Executive Director and Founder of Basel Action Network and has been an environmental health and justice advocate for 28 years.

Mint Innovation (the outfit running this pilot program) has a website.

Gold

A customer places gold wrapped in a crumpled bolivar banknote on to a scale for payment at a pharmacy in Tumeremo, Venezuela. Photographer: William Urdaneta/Bloomberg

The official Venezuelan currency, the Bolivar, is nearly worthless. Maduro, the pig, has just replaced the old Bolivar with a new one. The new one is worth one million of the old one. That should give you some idea of the rate of inflation down there. Most places are using foreign currency for everyday purchases, however things are little different in one area in southeast Venezuela. That area is home to a host of gold mines, so people are paying for things with flakes of gold, flakes of gold that they carry wrapped in Bolivars, which is about all the paper currency is good for.

Price of one gram of gold today is $57.58, almost $60, so a half gram is worth about $30, a quarter gram is worth about $15 and an eighth of a gram is worth about $7. Gold has a density of of 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, so a small flat square of the metal measuring one centimeter on a side and half a millimeter thick would be weigh one gram. For comparison, a gold coin the size of a dime would weigh six and half grams, which is a little more than twice as much as a real dime weighs.

Via Zerohedge

Gold Bars

Gold bars
Central Bank of Uzbekistan

Seems Utah and Nevada aren't the only ones worried about the ephemeral nature of paper money. 

Uzbekistan has appeared here a surprising number of times. 

Just for grins, here's a painting from the Wikipedia article about Uzbekistan:

Triumphant crowd at Registan, Sher-Dor Madrasah. The Emir of Bukhara viewing the severed heads of Russian soldiers on poles. Painting by Vasily Vereshchagin (1872).

Via Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge

Gold Dredge #9

My nephew Nick at the top of the boom on
Gold Dredge #9 in Fairbanks Alaska

Looking around for more info about the dredge I came across this video. Not great, but a good tune, a cute girl, and we get a tour of a dredge. Might be the same one, it's a little hard to tell. 


Gold Dredge #9
Christine H
It seems there are a few of these big old monster dredges around Fairbanks. Nick's dredge looks a whole lot like the Chatanika Gold Dredge No. 3. This one I was able to find on Google Maps.

Chatanika Gold Dredge No. 3.

John Day Oregon

Kam Wah Chung General Store
John Day Oregon

John drove out to John Day on Monday to get a client up to speed on a new computer system. John Day isn't much of a town, the population is less than 2,000, which isn't too surprising since it is smack dab in the middle of eastern Oregon, some of the most desolate terrain in the world. Okay, that's not exactly fair. The town is on the John Day river, in a valley surrounded by tree covered mountains. But Malheur county is right next door.

The Oregon Encyclopedia has a good article about the Kam Wah Chung General Store.

Wikipedia's article about the town notes that "federal policies . . . shut down all gold mining in the United States in 1942". Really? That sounds kind of weird. Google turns up a case on FindLaw that explains the situation:

Early in 1941, it became apparent to those in charge of the Nation's defense mobilization that we faced a critical shortage of nonferrous metals, notably copper, and a comparable shortage of machinery and supplies to produce them. Responsive to this situation, the Office of Production Management (OPM) and its successor, the War Production Board (WPB), issued a series of Preference Orders. These gave the producers of mining machinery and supplies relatively high priorities for the acquisition of needed materials. They also gave to those mines, which were deemed important from the standpoint of defense or essential civilian needs, a high priority in the acquisition of such machinery. Gold mines were classified as nonessential and eventually were relegated to the lowest priority rating.

Gold was non-essential? Who'd a thunk that gold, the most sought after metal in the world, would be deemed non-essential? Since gold has become the preferred material for plating electronic connectors I doubt that such an order would fly today.

Gold in Mali

From what I have seen and heard of Mali, it doesn't seem like there is much of anything there, but at lunch yesterday Don tells me that they have gold mines. Turns out he's right, and there are a bunch, including several big ones like the


Open Pit Syama Gold Mine  

 and who knows how many little ones.  

The open pit mines are digging up tons of earth to recover grams of gold. Does not seem like it should pay, but evidently if you can dig enough dirt it does. The amount of gold seems to vary between 1 and 5 grams per ton. The cost to recover one once of gold seems to be around $500, and they can sell those ounces for $1500. Each mine produces on the order of 100,000 ounces of gold a year, so the mine generates a profit of around a hundred million dollars a year. 

    In order to produce 100,000 ounces of gold, you need to dig up something like a million tons of dirt, which is why you need really big shovels and really big dump trucks.

    Of course there was a big upfront investment in time and money and politicking to get the whole thing set up and running, and all the money you are spending has an interest penalty attached to it. And then there is the whole "operating in Africa" thing, which means your whole operation could get wiped out by one of a vicious wars that Africa is famous for.

I came across several companies that are involved in gold mining in Mali:

• Endeavor Mining
• IAMGOLD
• RANGOLD Resources
• Resolute Mining Limited
• Snowden Group

Update March 2021 replaced missing map.