Hand over your gold & the curious case of fake gold bars!

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One can not assume everyone knows about everything.

With this in mind, let us take a stroll down recent history, not that long ago actually.


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1933!



Was the year of the greatest robbery ever known, and it happened in the USA. You may think it harsh for my terminology to state such, it is though based on "fact" allow me to provide proven links to history, not my thoughts, not my opinion, just pure fact.

Government Confiscation of Gold: It Happened Before — Could It Happen Again?

Our nation was founded with the sacred words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But in 1933, all that was shattered if by “pursuing happiness,” you chose to pursue gold.

The Foundations of the Great Confiscation.

Confiscation all dates back to the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. That year, President Woodrow Wilson signed the “TWEA” into law, forbidding American individuals and businesses from engaging in trade with “enemy nations.” The world’s functional gold standard, which had overseen tremendous global economic growth in the early years of the twentieth century, was effectively halted by the outbreak of World War I, and the stage was thus set for the Great Depression and World War II.
Shortly after taking office sixteen years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 into law, prohibiting the “hoarding” of gold. Under this executive order, Americans were prohibited from owning more than $100 worth of gold coins, and all “hoarders” (i.e. people who owned more than $100 worth of gold) were forced, by law, to sell their “excess” gold to the government at the prevailing price of $20.67 per ounce.

Then, once the government had all the gold, FDR revalued the dollar relative to gold so that gold was now worth $35 an ounce. By simple decree, the government had thereby robbed millions of American citizens at a rate of $14.33 per ounce of confiscated gold, which is why most historians agree that the Gold Confiscation of 1933 is the single most draconian economic act in the history of the United States.

The Utilitarian Rationale Behind Confiscation

The reasoning behind the Great Gold Confiscation was, of course, the Great Depression, which had begun several years prior. After an inflationary run-up in prices and asset values, the stock market crashed in 1929, and the economy soon went with the crash.
Rather than responding to the situation with laissez-fair wisdom, President Herbert Hoover, often accused of being a proponent of laissez fair by those to whom the term is considered an epithet — instead raised taxes and erected new trade barriers, intensifying the misery. When FDR was elected, the people were willing to go along with nearly anything to try to alleviate the deflation that had gripped the country and strangled economic activity.
The boom of the 1920s was largely an illusory creature of the still-new Federal Reserve’s gross ineptitude, and by the thirties when reality had caught up to the loose-money standards of the prior decade, the money supply quickly contracted, causing deflation.
Like inflation, deflation also begets more of itself, and as prices dropped, it became wiser for the possessors of money to hold it rather than spend it, since prices would be lower the next day — and even lower the day after that — ad infinitum.
Since no one was spending money, businesses went under and people were out of the work, thus making the situation worse. In response, FDR knew what needed to be done — prices needed to be stabilized. On this, few would disagree. The exception economists take is with the implementation the president chose to pursue.
First, as discussed, private ownership of gold was effectively barred. The only exceptions were coinage worth $100 or less, or collectible coins, industrial uses, and jewelry. Gold could not be “hoarded” as a significant investment, and all “hoarders” were made to sell their gold to the government.

The Federal Reserve itself — a private banking cartel more so than an arm of government — was not excluded from this requirement either, as made clear by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. That legislation required the Fed to surrender all gold and gold certificates held, to the United States Treasury.
Finally, the dollar was revalued, and U.S. Dollars was then redeemable at a rate of $35 an ounce, as opposed to the old gold standard of $20.67. However, it’s important to note that only foreign bankers and international governments could redeem their dollars for gold — private gold ownership was still illegal in the U.S. until the end of 1974.
The effect revaluation had on the U.S. dollar was an instant depreciation of 41%. Thus, prices were pushed back up again, in nominal terms, at least. What the long-term effects of this action would have been in the absence of World War II will never be known, but within a few years, the U.S. war economy was humming.

Following the end of the second great war, the U.S. stood alone as an economic super power, virtually untouched by the Axis or Allies, while most of Europe lay in ruins. It all made Roosevelt’s coercive and unconstitutional acts look ingenious, but scholars from the left and right continue to debate whether they were truly wise or if the New Deal was bailed out by global externalities.
So, under legally dubious means, FDR and Congress passed a law outlawing the private ownership of gold in excess of $100. Millions of Americans were made to trade in their gold coins for paper dollars — effectively at gunpoint. Then, once all the coins were in the government’s coffers, FDR revalued the dollar from $20.67 per ounce of gold to $35 an ounce — a theft of almost forty-once cents on the dollar.

Gold ownership remained illegal in the United States until 1954. That year, the Treasury Department legalized the ownership of rare coins. What was a rare coin? Well, since the government had seized all pre-1934 coins, then by definition, all such coins were deemed “rare.” After all, these coins were so uncommon that those few in circulation were worth much more than their face value or the value of the gold of which they were made — the coins had numismatic value. They effectively were no longer “money,” and thus they didn’t pose a competitive threat to the government’s fiat currency.

Full source link for the curious of mind
Another great - related article


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Still want to vote for politicians?



The second part to this is the fake gold part. There is "fact" only enough gold in the entire world, that has ever been mined, to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools. 155 - 165 tonnes seems to be the number, don't take my word for it though, click the links blow.

All gold mined in history, stacked in 400 oz bars. The 166,500 tonnes here is actually divided into four levels: the bottom level is jewellery (50.5% of all gold), the 2nd level is private investment (18.7%), the third level is world governments (17.4%), and the highest level is other uses for gold such as industry (13.4%).

Source

"Will all the gold in the world fill 2 Olympic sized swimming pools?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold
Density of gold: 19.30 g·cm-3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram_per_cubic_metre
1 g/cm3 equals 1000 kg/m3
thus: 19,300 kilos per cubic meter for gold

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=...y+ounce+per+kilogram&aq=0&aqi=g1&oq=troy+ounce+per+kilo&fp=8ec9ea851cee2c5b

1 kilogram = 32.1507466 troy ounce - 620,509 troy oz. per cubic meter
1 tonne = 32,150.7466 troy ounce
19.3 tonnes per cubic meter, acts to check and prove the "kilo per oz." and "tonne per oz." maths is correct.

19,300 kilos = 19.3 metric tonnes per cubic meter.

155,000 tonnes of gold mined in all of human history
divided by 19.3 tonnes per cubic meter,
equals 8031 cubic meters!

Volume of an Olympic Swimming Pool?
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/...yGilbert.shtml

25 meters by 50 meters by 2-3 meters deep = 25 x 50 x 2.5 = 3125 cubic meters -8031 cubic meters / 3125 cubic meters = 2.57 pools

Thus, all the gold in all the world, ever mined in all of human history, will fill 2.57 Olympic Sized swimming pools.
Since the depth of an Olympic Swimming pool can be deeper, and since the 2-3 meter depth is a minimum, all the gold in all the world would easily fit into two slightly deeper than normal, Olympic Sized Swimming pools.

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Did the non federal, federal reserve con the world with fake gold bars?



Not sure about you, though I like a good mystery to solve, and this one has held my interest for a long time, since I found out that the con trick was so easy. The weight of tungsten you see, is similar to gold, so they moulded fake bars, and dipped them in 24 carrot gold.

The counterfeit story! By MERLIN LAFLEUR, 2009/12/02

This October, bankers in Hong Kong were in for a rude shock when they discovered some gold bars from the US to be actually gold plated tungsten i.e., fake gold bars. Acting fast, the Chinese officials found the perpetrators within hours. It seems that fake Tungsten blanks, between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz, were manufactured in the US about fifteen years ago during the Clinton administration. Said to have been done by a very sophisticated refiner, 640,000 of these tungsten planks were gold plated and shifted to Fort Knox. The remaining also gold plated, but sold into the international market. (Fort Knox , as you may be aware, is the United States Bullion Depository, where the official gold reserves of the federal government are stored. This depository of about 4,603 tons (4 176 metric tonnes) is the second highest gold depository in the US after the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in Manhattan (5,000 metric tonnes of gold). Whoever pulled this one on the gold bars had connections inside the government, big banks and also a top-of-the-line fabrication facility. For, counterfeit is not something new for the US government, it did this is 1964 when zinc dimes clad in silver were introduced. That's why the pre 1964 coins are valued more. Elsewhere, early this year, another counterfeit story made rounds as some of the gold bars in the vaults of the National bank of Ethiopia were found to be gold plated steel. It made news when the shipment of gold was returned by South Africa. It only could have been the work of a genius as fake gold bars made of steel are among the easiest to detect as they are lighter. Among gold coins, 22k Gold coins such as Krugerrand, are less likely to be counterfeited because the density of 22k gold minted from gold alloy that is 91.67 percent pure, is far apart from that of tungsten. Tungsten has the same density (19.25g/cm3) as gold, so a fake bar is indistinguishable by weighing it. In comparison the density of pure 24k gold is within 0.26% of tungsten.

Source: Gold-quote.net
The table above illustrates that although tungsten's density is within 0.26% of pure gold making it nearly impossible to detect, it is nearly 5% heavier than the 22 karat gold of Krugerrands. The dimension differences of a counterfeited 22 karat coin would have to be 6 times larger than those of a pure gold coin to weight the same. So one is 6 times more likely to detect a counterfeited 22k coin or piece of jewellery than a counterfeited pure gold bar through simple measurement.

So just by weighing the coins you would tell a difference. So why aren't so many fake coins in the market? Coins are more liquid and circulated; they change hands more readily so it's more likely a fake one will be detected. Gold bars on the other hands are given as little exposure to human hands as possible (fear of theft). They are conveyed in armoured trucks, their serial numbers are exchanged and they're stacked away in a vault never to see the light of day again. Their credibility relies on a piece of paper and paper is easy to forge. Also the labour involved in making fake coins does not make it as worth a criminal's time as a gold bar. (it costs $50,000 to make a fake $400,000 gold bar because of the real gold coating and the labour). Gold coins have lots of details including the number of ridges on the sides etc..and there are a lot of numismatic aficionados out there to tell a real from a fake.

Full source

A few link drops for you to research if you like - below.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/de/content/fake-gold-bars-fort-knox#axzz5H1J9c6Wu
https://agrdailynews.com/2016/11/27/clintons-and-federal-reserve-bankers-linked-to-fake-gold-in-fort-knox-uprootedpalestinianss-blog/
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-24/get-your-fake-tungsten-filled-gold-coins-here

My reasons for doing this?



Well you see I collect many things, from Lego to vinyl, to motorbikes, uncut diamonds, gold and silver plus other things, and have bought some fakes before, so I would like to leave you with a video of how to spot fake gold, there are also videos on how to spot fake silver, though this is a gold post, so lets stick to the topic at hand.




As always, have a superb summer full of fun, catch you tomorrow.



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Deliberators verdict = one more memory down on the blockchain.


Deliberator = Definition of deliberator
plural -s
: one that deliberates

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Images courtesy of pixabay.

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Great article, and very timely. When TSHTF there will very likely be more seizures attempted. Of course, people are probably a little less obedient and trusting of the Federal government than they were back in '33. They didn't know FDR was a Communist, duped by his hardcore Communist wife, Eleanor.

I would say that the most draconian economic act of the federal government, NOW, would have to be the minimum wage. The gold seizure was a close second, but the minimum wage is/was the final nail in the coffin of our once amazing true laissez-faire economic system. The minimum wage is now opening the door for even more blatant communist ideas, including the basic individual income.

Also, I would never recommend buying bars. The more value an individual PM piece has, the higher the risk of counterfeiting. Unless you are a pro with essaying equipment, I would steer clear of bars. People are going to be trading silver and SMALL quantities of gold when TSHTF, not gold bars. I, personally, recommend 1/20 and 1/10 ounce bullion coins, and ONLY FROM ESTABLISHED sources .

Superb comment, and so true, I love it on here when people like you come along, it restores my faith in humanity, stay awesome my friend, and thanks for stopping by.

Wow. Thanks! Maybe we're lost brothers from another mother...?

LOL I seem to be tripping over so many of them of late, so maybe just maybe you are.

Amazing work! And yeah Clinton gold bars being fake... The Chinese were not happy.

Pass me a joint brah, I love the name, I grow some also, on occasions, have a great week.

Thanks and doing my best to grow the Cannabis community! Doing pretty good for grilling chicken outside the SteemVan with @aresheir after training!

Superb stuff, wishing you every success my friend.

Thank's and you too!

Thanks i did not know about the fake gold.

I knew about it as some even turned up in London, they tried to keep it quiet so they could sell it on to China, though the Chinese were not so quiet about the whole thing as they wanted cash back, not fake gold.

Haha good on the chinese for speaking up.

A friend of my nephews cousin got hit with one of those 'tungsten' fakes at his jewelry store some years back...Financial loss was weighty.

I bet it was costly, seems the usual suspects were involved "the Clintons" from research.

Well...it 'did' happen during their reign...Hmmmnnnn

And was signed off by the administration for the sale to China. I never heard what happened to them after that. But it cost alot to forge them and that could only come from one nation...

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

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