but what it is ain’t exactly clear.
1] - irregularities in the publication of the gold ETF - GLD’s bar list from Sept. 25 – Oct.14 where the length of the bar list went from 1,381 pages to under 200 pages and then back up to 800 or so pages.
2] - reports of 400 oz. “good delivery” bricks of gold found gutted and filled with tungsten within the confines of LBMA approved vaults in Hong Kong.
I am, as I have said in the past, a compleat financial retard. Funds and baskets and prospectuses (prospectii?) are gibberish wrapped in Greek with a creamy core of babble nougat. There are, however, a few things about this story that stand out even to the likes of me...I’m just not completely sure of the import.
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 balance of this 1.3 million – 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten cache was also plated and then allegedly “sold” into the international market.
Apparently, the global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 oz salted bars”.
Tungsten, as is explained earlier in the story, is a good metal for faking up gold bars with. Its low cost and similar weight mean you can take a slug of tungsten, cover it with a thin layer of gold, and pass it off as a solid gold bar which can’t be distinguished from the real thing by simply weighing it.
And now, when the dollar is dropping like a rock and the value of gold is going through the roof, we may find out that a huge amount of that “gold” being traded and hoarded and hidden in various funds is better suited for making incandescent bulb filaments than coinage.
There’s more, much more, and only some of it makes sense to me. FOIA requests denied by the Federal Reserve, slush funds...read it all.
apotheosis, unrepentant milkaholic 
