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IPFS News Link • Currencies

Things going wrong in the gold market

• Market Skeptic
 
Specifically, here is what has happened to the GLD bar list which is published each Friday at approximately 4:30 pm EST. An alert reader I communicate with [who shall remain anonymous] has been documenting the length of the published GLD bar list:
 
- on Friday, Sept. 25 – the list was 1,381 pages long
- on Friday, Oct. 2 – the list was 208 pages long
- on Friday, Oct. 9 – the list was 195 pages long
- then, on Wednesday, Oct. 14 – after questions were being raised about the strange machinations with the bar list in chat rooms on the internet – the list was back up to 855 pages long
 
Something TRULY stinks here. No explanation has been offered for the DRAMATIC swings in this list. Where gold is concerned nothing happens by accident.
 

How Precious is Settled in London:


 
Loco London clearing is the daily paper unallocated transfers between London clearers; the transfers of gold and silver only across accounts held between clearers for their own accounts and third parties; and, as mentioned earlier, the clearing out of Zürich for the platinum group metals. It avoids security risk and the cost of physical movement of bullion; has standard market practices…
 
[However] Both allocated and unallocated account agreements are available. There are allocations for credit purposes, bilateral credit agreements between clearers, and London good delivery….
 
Some short definitions: an unallocated account is an account where specific bars are not set aside, and the customer has a general entitlement to the metal. This is the most convenient, cheapest, and most commonly used method of holding metal. The allocated account, on the other hand, is an account opened when a customer requires metal to be physically segregated, and this needs a detailed list of weights and assays….
 
To Summarize:
 
- GLD gold bullion inventory is principally held in London
- I’ve already written about some large [allocated] physical transactions that were settled last week in London under VERY strange circumstances indicative of a shortage of physical gold bullion for good delivery.
- At the same time, significant irregularities appeared in the GLD bullion bar list
 
Conclusion:
 
- is the correlated timing of these unusual events a coincidence????Could GLD inventory have been utilized to effect these physical settlements, which in turn, would have required the “sanitization” or doctoring of the GLD bar list to avoid MANY obvious, easily detectable, duplications of bar numbers?
 
I discussed these irregularities with a very informed source [the same one who informed me of specific [allocated] trades settled last week] and the reply I received was as follows:
 
“What can I tell you that you don't already know?
 
They are all scrambling big time since a number of large interests have demanded audits. Independent auditors are NOW descending onto the various vaults to verify, validate and certify.
 
They can move this as many times in circles as they like to try to fool people. 
 
In an Asian depository they’ve found “Good Delivery” bricks that had been gutted and filled with tungsten. 
 
Soon, there will be xxxx hitting the fan all over place.”
 
These circumstances suggest that a VERY REAL physical short squeeze is in progress RIGHT NOW and a gang of fraudsters from “fiat-crack-houses” [Central Banks] are attempting to finesse their losing over-sold hand in an elaborate Three-card Monty. With reports of independent physical audits now being conducted and mysterious happenings with GLD’s bar list – GLD has NEVER looked more suspect.
 
Hope you’ve all got some physical gold already.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Chip Saunders
Entered on:

In case you're wondering why tungsten would be used to fill a gutted (formerly solid) gold brick;....

 

How to Make Convincing Fake-Gold Bars



http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/20...fake-gold-bars

"
Now, for me the more interesting question is, how do you make a fake gold bar that at least passes the pick-it-up test? The problem is that there are very few metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions they all cost as much or more than gold.
The first exception is depleted uranium, which is cheap if you're a government, but hard for individuals to get. It's also radioactive, which could be a bit of an issue.



The second exception is a real winner: tungsten. Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it's the wrong color, and that it's much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.)


A top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don't know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16" layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You'd pretty much have to drill it to find out it's fake. (Unless, of course, central bank gold inspectors are wise to this trick and have developed a test for it: Something involving speed of sound say, or more powerful x-rays, or perhaps neutron activation analysis. If bars like this are actually a common problem, you certainly could devise a quick, non-destructive test for them, and for all I know, they have. Except, apparently, in Ethiopia.)


Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about $50,000 to produce because it's got a lot of real gold in it, but you'd still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth closer to $400,000. A lower budget version could be made by using the same under-sized tungsten slug but casting lead-antimony alloy around it (to match the hardness, sound, and feel of gold), then electroplating on a heavy coating of gold. Such a bar would still feel and sound right and be only very slightly underweight, while costing less than $500 to produce in quantity. It would not pass x-ray fluorescence, and whether it passes a chemical test would depend on how thick the electroplating is.


This is the solution I recommended for Cobra Gold, because they only needed their fake gold to pass a field inspection, which is to say, someone picking it up and knowing what gold should feel like when you lift it. You may quibble for other aspects of the plot if you like, but I think the fake gold would have worked.
 


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