China, gold prices & US default threats....Where there is Smoke there's 'Tungsten Gold bars?'

China, gold prices and US default threats...."Where there is Smoke there's 'Tungsten Gold bars?'(RT).

Since August 1971, when US President Richard Nixon unilaterally tore up the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944 and told the world that the Federal Reserve ‘gold window’ was permanently closed, Wall Street banks and US and City of London financial powers have done everything imaginable to prevent gold from again becoming the basis of trust in a currency. 

On Friday, October 11, when there was no sign of any deal between US Congress members and the Obama White House that would end the government shutdown, the Chicago CME Group, which operates Comex - the Chicago Commodity Exchange, where contracts in gold derivatives are traded - announced that at 8:42am Eastern time the trading was halted for 10 seconds after a safety mechanism was triggered because a 2-million-ounce (56.7 million grams) gold futures sell order was executed.

Something rotten in gold market.  

The result of that huge paper gold sale was that at just the time when a possible US government debt default would send investors in a panic rush to the safety of buying gold, instead, the price plunged $30 an ounce to a three-month low of $1,259.60 an ounce. Market insiders believe the reason was direct market manipulation.

David Govett, head of precious metals at bullion broker Marex Spectron, calls the sudden huge futures sale suspicious. 
"These moves are becoming more and more prevalent and to my mind have to either be the work of someone attempting to manipulate the market or someone who really shouldn’t be trusted with the sums of money they are throwing around. There are ways of entering and exiting a market so that minimum damage is caused and whoever is entering these orders has no intention of doing that," Govett said.
UBS gold trader Art Cashin echoed the suspicion. 
“…if that happens once it could be an accident of technology, or it could be a simple error. But when it happens five times over a period of months, it does raise questions. Is it being done purposefully? Is somebody trying to influence the market?” 


That ‘someone’ market sources believe is the Obama White House, in league with the Federal Reserve and key Wall Street banks that would be ruined were gold to really rise.

Hmmmm.......According to unofficial calculations, the Peoples’ Bank of China today holds about 3,500 tons of monetary gold, surpassing Germany, to make it number two in the world after the Federal Reserve.

And there are grave doubts whether the Federal Reserve actually holds the 8,044 tons of gold it claims it does. 

The former International Monetary Fund director, France’s Dominique Straus-Kahn, demanded an independent audit of the Federal Reserve gold after the US refused to deliver to the IMF 191 tons of gold agreed to under the IMF Articles of Agreement signed by the Executive Board in April 1978 to back Special Drawing Rights issuance.

Immediately before he could rush back to Paris, he was hit by a bizarre hotel sex scandal and abruptly forced to resign. 

Straus-Kahn had been shown a secret Russian intelligence report prepared for President Vladimir Putin in which ‘rogue’ CIA agents revealed that the US Federal Reserve had no gold reserves and only lied that it did.

The stakes for Washington and Wall Street in depressing the gold price are staggering. Were gold to soar to $10,000 or more, where many believe current demand-supply pressures would find it, there would be a panic selloff of the dollar and of US Treasury bonds. China now holds a record $3.7 trillion of foreign currency reserves and the US Treasury bonds and bills are about half that.

That selloff would send US interest rates sky-high, forcing a chain-reaction of corporate and personal bankruptcies that have been avoided since the financial crisis broke in 2007 only owing to record near-zero Federal Reserve interest rates. That selloff, in turn, would be the end of the US as the world’s sole superpower. Little wonder the Obama Administration is manipulating gold. It cannot last very long at this pace, however. Read the full story here.


Like Nessie these 'Stories' pop up once in a while:



Related: Hmmm.....Flashback: MFS - The Other News - March 26 th :  "Not everything that shines is Gold !" Tungsten Filled 1 kilo Gold Bar Discovered in UK.
Within mere hours of this scam being identified – Chinese officials had many of the perpetrators in custody.
And here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered: Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day. I know folks who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox.

Another "Swiss Gold Bars Scam" discovered - Tungsten-Filled 10 Oz Gold Bar Found In The Middle Of Manhattan's Jewelry District.

Hmmmm.....'Glitch' Blocked Goldman at Treasury Auction.

Hmmmm.....'Glitch' Blocked Goldman at Treasury Auction.HT:  Wall Street Journal:

The Treasury is investigating the glitch, said people familiar with the situation. A spokeswoman at the New York Fed referred questions to the Treasury Department.

The mishap is the latest in a string of technical hiccups in U.S. financial markets that have raised anxieties among investors about losing money because of balky computers. The glitches are coming as banks and regulators push for trading to become more automated and electronic.
The orderly processing of debt auctions is critical to funding U.S. government programs and obligations. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York gathers and processes orders for Treasury auctions several times a month.

A glitch in a computer system at the center of the $11.6 trillion market for U.S. government debt last week blocked Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s multibillion-dollar order at an auction of Treasury bills, leaving the bank empty-handed and altering prices in the U.S. debt market.

The Treasury Department on Sept. 9 sold $30 billion of bills that mature in three months. Goldman was left out when its order didn’t go through the computers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which conducts debt auctions for the Treasury. When Treasury officials noticed the botched order, they manually allotted Goldman more T-bills that mature in six months than the bank had asked for in a simultaneous auction.
The Treasury Department has released few details about what happened, saying only that it suffered “a technical issue” in its web-based portal that “resulted in one bidder being unable to access the 3-month auction,” according to a statement on its Web site last week. The Treasury didn’t identify Goldman as the bidder.

Putin Responds To Syria Escalation: May ‘Reinforce Naval Grouping In Mediterranean’ Following US Buildup.

Putin Responds To Syria Escalation: May ‘Reinforce Naval Grouping In Mediterranean’ Following US Buildup.(ZeroHedge).

Newton’s third law strikes again.

Yesterday, when describing the latest US developments in the Syrian “liberation” and “WMD elimination” we pointed out that the “use of war as a culmination point to end a depression is nothing new. Just look at the first Great Depression. And just like then, the only cost to perpetuate the myth of the Keynesian and monetarist religion and the pillaged wealth of the 0.01% status quo elite, will be a few hundred thousand innocent men, women and children. Or, as they are known in the Beltway, collateral damage. That is, unless, Putin decides to retaliate.”

Moments ago Interfax reported that Russia is starting to pre-emptively, for now, retaliate.

More from Interfax:

Russia can increase its military presence in the Mediterranean in the case of the possible enlargement of the U.S. naval grouping in the region in the event of the aggravation of the situation in Syria, President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems Leonid Ivashov believes.

“Russia can increase its naval grouping in the Mediterranean as a reply measure. I think that nothing else remains to prevent the development of the factor of aggression,” he said to Interfax-AVN on Saturday commenting on media reports of the possible increase in U.S. naval presence in the Mediterranean.

In his opinion, Russia should point out to the world the most crying violations of the UN Charter concerning Egypt and especially Syria.

“We should be speaking more strongly of noninterference in the internal affairs of Syria,” Ivashov said.

He said that deliveries of Russian defense systems to the Syrian armed forces could become a lever of influencing the United States and of averting the threat of an attack on Syria.

Will Obama’s misreading of the “New Normal” geopolitical balance of power, in which America is rapidly relegating itself from global superpower status and in which Putin most certainly does not see himself as inferior to the US, yet in which there is no actual game theoretical winner if everyone defects (but lots and lots of losers, except for the Fed) force America into a milltary confrontation from which there is no easy and simple way out?

We will find out over the next several days.

* * *

If there is still anyone confused about what the true underlying dynamics behind the “Syrian” question are, we urge you to read this.

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Video - Currency World War looms as Japan, China, US & Europe decline.

Video - F@#K The Fed.

HT: InvestmentWatch.

Treasury Quietly Warns: 'Expect Debt Limit to Be Reached Near End of 2012.'

Treasury Quietly Warns: 'Expect Debt Limit to Be Reached Near End of 2012.'(CNS).The U.S. Treasury quietly warned at the end of a statement issued last Wednesday that it expects the federal government to hit its legal debt limit before the end of this year--which means before the new Congress is seated--and that "extraordinary measures" will be needed before then to keep the government fully funded into the early part of 2013. 

On Aug. 2, 2011, President Obama signed a deal he had negotiated with congressional leaders to increase the debt limit of the federal government by $2.4 trillion. But, now, after only 15 months, almost all of that additional borrowing authority has been exhausted. 

Although Treasury revealed in its statement on Wednesday that it was likely to hit the debt limit by the end of the year, Treasury Secretary Geithner failed to respond to a letter that Senate Finance Ranking Member Orrin Hatch and Senate Budget Ranking Member Jeff Sessions sent to him on Oct. 15 demanding that he notify them by Nov. 1 what he believes to be the exact date Treasury will hit the debt limit and the date he expects to begin using "extraordinary measures" to avoid it. "Treasury continues to expect the debt limit to be reached near the end of 2012," says the tenth paragraph of the "Quarterly Refunding Statement" put out by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets Matthew Rutherford. "However, Treasury has the authority to take certain extraordinary measures to give Congress more time to act to ensure we are able to meet the legal obligations of the United States of America," said the statement. "We continue to expect that these extraordinary measures would provide sufficient 'headroom' under the debt limit to allow the government to continue to meet its obligations until early in 2013." Prior to the release of this statement, Sen. Hatch and Sen. Sessions sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner a letter asking him specific questions about the approaching debt limit and the administration's plans for dealing with it.
Hatch's and Sessions's questions included these two:

1) "What is Treasury’s forecast of the date upon which Treasury will find it necessary to use extraordinary measures to manage to keep federal debt at or below the statutory debt limit? 

2) "What is Treasury’s forecast of the date upon which the U.S. government will reach the statutory debt limit given use and exhaustion of these extraordinary measures?"

The senators gave Geithner a "hard deadline" of Nov. 1 for providing an initial response to these questions.Julia Lawless, spokesperson for the Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, confirmed that as of Nov. 6 the committee had received no response from the Treasury secretary. As of Oct. 31, according to the Daily Treasury Statement (DTS), the portion of the federal debt subject to the legal limit was $16,222,235,000,000--just $171.765 billion below the $16,394,000,000 debt limit. In October alone, according to the DTS, the debt subject to the limit increased by $195.214 billion.Hmmmm.............."Fed Communism"? - Federal Reserve, begun purchasing $40 billion in mortgage backed securities and Treasuries each month, indefinitely.Read the full story here.