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.

"Deutsche Gründlichkeit" - Why Germany Wants to See its US Gold.

"Deutsche Gründlichkeit" - Why Germany Wants to See its US Gold.(Spiegel).By By Sven Böll and Anne Seith.Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann wanted to personally convince Peter Gauweiler that the German gold was still where it should be. Early this summer, the head of Germany's central bank took the obstinate politician from the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), a party that is a member of the government coalition in Berlin, and a number of his colleagues into the Bundesbank's inner sanctum: the gold vault.
There, 6,000 gold bars are stacked on industrial-strength shelves in a purpose-built building in Frankfurt. An additional 76,000 bars of bullion are stored in four safe boxes, in sealed containers.

But even this personal inspection wasn't enough to reassure the visiting member of parliament -- on the contrary: "The Bundesbank monitors its domestic gold in an exemplary fashion," Gauweiler says, "and this makes it all the more incomprehensible that the bank doesn't look after its reserves abroad."
For quite some time now, Gauweiler has been pestering the government and the Bundesbank with questions concerning where and how the country's reserves are stored, and how often they are checked. He has submitted requests and commissioned reports on the topic.
Last week, Gauweiler celebrated his greatest triumph to date in his gold campaign, which has been a source of some amusement for many fellow German politicians: A secret report by the Federal Audit Office had been made public -- and it contained stern criticism of the German central bank in Frankfurt. The Bonn-based auditors urged a better inventory system, including quality checks.
This demand, which even the bank's inspectors saw as nothing more than routine, alarmed the Berlin political establishment. Indeed, the partially blacked-out report read like the prologue to an espionage thriller in which the stunned central bankers could end up standing in front of empty vaults in the US.

For decades, German central bankers have contented themselves with written affirmations from their American colleagues that the gold still remains where it is said to be stored. According to the report, the bar list from New York stems from "1979/1980."
The report also noted that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York refuses to allow the gold's owners to view their own reserves.
Not surprisingly, this prompted strong reactions in Berlin:
The relevant Bundesbank board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele was summoned to Berlin to provide an explanation to the parliamentary budget committee. Heinz-Peter Haustein of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) was even quoted by Germany's mass-circulation Bild newspaper as saying that "all the gold has to be shipped back."

There is in fact nothing unusual about how Germany deals with the precious metal. Many other central banks store a portion of their gold reserves abroad. The Netherlands, for example, places its trust in its colleagues in Ottawa, New York and London.
But the relationship Germans have with their gold is a special one. Germany hoards nearly 3,600 metric tons of the precious metal -- only the US has more. 
Much of this gold treasure was amassed under the Bretton Woods international monetary system, in which the dollar served as the world's key currency and was directly convertible to fixed quantities of gold.
Before the gold standard was terminated in 1971, the current account surpluses generated by Germany's "economic miracle" were partially balanced out in gold. Thousands of US bars of gold alone were transferred to German ownership.
But since the euro is not backed by gold, such vast reserves are actually no longer necessary. Nevertheless, the Germans continue to resolutely defend them -- and every attempt to use this treasure has been met with dismay.

Finally, in 2007, "following numerous enquiries," Bundesbank staff members were allowed to see the facility, but they reportedly only made it to the anteroom of the German reserves.
In fact, auditors from the Bundesbank made a second visit in May 2011. This time one of the nine compartments was also opened, in which the German gold bars are densely stacked. A few were pulled out and weighed. But this part of the report has been blacked out -- out of consideration for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
"I would like more transparency on the issue," says Bundesbank board member Thiele. The Americans are very sensitive, though, when it comes to security procedures in their gold storage facilities. In their second major depository, the legendary Fort Knox, practically no one in recent decades has been allowed to view the gold reserves.Read the full story here.

Hurry , hurry - Get Your Fake Tungsten-Filled Gold Coins Here.

1oz South African Krugerrand Obverse.

tungsten-alloy gold coin China

Hurry , hurry - Get Your Fake Tungsten-Filled Gold Coins  Here.(ZH).By Tyler Durden.In the aftermath of the recent stories about Tungsten-filled 10 ounce gold bars discovered in midtown Manhattan, there have been two broad sentiments expressed by the precious metals community: i) that this is as many have expected, and that of the physical inventory in circulation, much is fake (particularly that held in official hands, either via ETFs or in sovereign repositories which for various reasons still can not be publicly assayed) and ii) is the comfort that while it is relatively easy and cost-effective to use tungsten to falsify larger gold bars and bricks, those who own primarily gold coins are safe as for some reason, it is less economic, feasible or widespread to counterfeit smaller precious metal denominations. Sadly, while i) may be true, ii) is patently false. The proof comes courtesy of a firm called ChinaTungsten Online which proudly markets its broad "tungsten-alloy services" including, you guessed it, the gold plating of various tungsten formulations among them "gold" bricks, bars and, yes, coins. Oh did we mention a Chinese company openly advertizes its tungsten gold-plating and precious metals replication services, something which the tabloid media's CTRL-C/V majors openly mock as improbable conspiracy theory. Well, as they say, it is only conspiracy theory until it becomes conspiracy fact.
From the website's Tungsten Heavy Alloy Scan Gold Coin section:

Tungsten is the only lower value metal that has a specific density close enough to gold to fabricate passable counterfeit pieces of the same size and weight as genuine Pictures of tungsten fake gold coins and ingots. Over the years, there have been a few isolated reports of smaller tungsten fake gold coin found to have been drilled to remove some of the gold which was replaced with tungsten. However, tungsten fake gold coin is far more profitable to fabricate larger original bars of tungsten that are then scanning gold.

Because the existence of counterfeit tungsten fake gold coin could have such a huge impact on the financial markets, there is a huge potential for deception and misinformation to be passed around. Be very careful about automatically believing any story you may hear. For your own protection, tungsten fake gold coin would be better to take physical possession of the smaller sizes of tungsten fake gold coins and now, and know that what you own genuine solid tungsten fake gold coin. [ZH: reread that sentence: "genuine solid tungsten fake gold coin"]


Notice: Chinatungsten Online (Xiamen) Manu.& Sales Corp. is a very professional and serious company, specializing in manufacturing and selling tungsten fake gold coin and other tungsten related products for more than two decades. We are a professional tungsten fake gold coin manufacturer. Our tungsten gold fake coin is only for souvenir and decoration purpose. Here we declare: Please do not use our tungsten fake gold coin and other fake gold coin products for any illegal purpose. We can provide all kinds of tungsten fake gold coin as your requirements.Our tungsten fake gold coin products are qualified.Read the full story here.

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

Another "Swiss Gold Bars Scam" discovered - Tungsten-Filled 10 Oz Gold Bar Found In The Middle Of Manhattan's Jewelry District.(ZH).It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or in Germany: after all out of sight, and across the Atlantic, certainly must mean out of mind, and out of the safe. However, when a 10 ounce 999.9 gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux (PAMP, with owner MTP) and a serial number (serial #038892, likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across the world but that's a different story), mysteriously emerges in the heart of the world's jewerly district located on 47th street in Manhattan, things get real quick. Moments ago, Myfoxny reported that a 10-ounce gold bar costing nearly $18,000 turned out to be a counterfeit. The discovery was made by the dealer Ibrahim Fadl, who bought the PAMP bar in question from a merchant who has sold him real gold before. "But he heard counterfeit gold bars were going around, so he drilled into several of his gold bars worth $100,000 and saw gray tungsten -- not gold. The bar was filled with tungsten, which weighs nearly the same as gold but costs just over a dollar an ounce."

What makes so devious is a real gold bar is purchased with the serial numbers and papers, then it is hollowed out, the gold is sold, the tungsten is put in, then the bar is closed up. That is a sophisticated operation.
MTB, the Swiss manufacturer of the gold bars, said customers should only buy from a reputable merchant. The problem, he admits, is Ibrahim Fadl is a very reputable merchant.
Raymond Nessim, CEO Manfra, Tordell & Brookes, said he has reported the situation to the FBI and Secret Service.
The Secret Service, which deals with counterfeits, said it is investigating.

And cue panic on the realization that virtually any gold bar in the world, not just those in Europe and Australia, which have already had close encounters with Tungsten substitutes, but also New York may be hollowed out and have a real worth of a few dollars max. Which, sadly, is fitting considering our main story from last night was the realization that an unknown amount of Chinese iron ore had either never existed or had simply vaporized, and was no longer serving as the secured collateral to various liabilities circulating in the electronic ether. After all, only the most naive out there could conceive of gold being sacrosanct when every other asset class is being diluted to infinity by a regime that has long since run out of money.
As for gold-based transactions on West 47th street: look for that market to grind to a halt at least for as long as it takes for this scandal to be forgotten too.
The only open question remaining will be how much of the gold located 90 feet below Libert 33 is in the same Tungstenized format. For what it's worth: it is unlikely we will ever find out.
This is what glaring gold counterfeiting looks like:

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.

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and the FDIC Mulling New Gold Regulation; ‘May be biggest event in gold market since US dropped gold standard’

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and the FDIC Mulling New Gold Regulation; ‘May be biggest event in gold market since US dropped gold standard’.(SR).See also: Bank of International Settlements: Gold Becomes a Tier 1 Asset Class for Banks, A Stabilizing Mechanism‎
Is gold safe or dangerous now?
US authorities have recently called for comment on a rule change that may impact the gold market.
The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and the FDIC have jointly sought comment on changing some capital adequacy rules for when an institution holds gold in its own vaults or in another’s vaults.
According to the draft documents released, when gold is currently held as an asset, it is risk weighted at 15% – that is, a 15% haircut is taken on its current value for capital adequacy calculations. (See page 86 of the attached Federal Reserve document.)
However, in this same document, they are proposing that there be no (zero) discount.
That would then put gold on the same basis as cash.Fans of gold are taking an interest in this potential development. As Greene notes: “It may be one of the most important events in the gold market since the US abandoned the gold standard.”Read the full story here.

Related? Societe Generale: Gold Could Surge Over 500%


Related - Buyer beware ! MFS - The Other News : 

This bar was purchased by staff of a scrap dealer in xxxxx, UK yesterday. The bar appeared to be perfect other than the fact that it was 2gms underweight. It was checked by hand-held xrf and showed 99.98% Au. Being Tungsten, it would not be ferro-magnetic. The bar was supplied with the original certificate. The owner of the business that purchased the bar only became suspicious when he realized the weight discrepancy and had the bar cropped. He estimates between 30-40% of the weight of the bar to be Tungsten.

The amount of “salted tungsten” gold bars in question was allegedly between 5,600 and 5,700 – 400 oz – good delivery bars [roughly 60 metric tonnes].
This was apparently all highly orchestrated by an extremely well financed criminal operation.

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.Read the full story here.