Start Thinking About Silver Before It Becomes Popular Again

Start Thinking About Silver Before It Becomes Popular Again

Notes From The Field By Simon Black

 October 21, 2019  San Juan, Puerto Rico

In 663 BC, King Ashurbanipal of the Assyrian Empire invaded Egypt and sacked the city of Waset (located in modern day Luxor on the Nile River).

Ashurbanipal vanquished the city, purportedly seizing more than 75 metric tons of silver for his personal collection.

At the time in the ancient world, the prevailing ratio between gold and silver was 1:2. In other words, 75 metric tons (= 75,000 kilograms) of silver was worth 37,500 kilograms of gold, equal to $1.76 billion in today’s money.

That 1:2 gold/silver ratio had held for thousands of years across Persia, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt, possibly since as early as 3,000 BC.

But over time it has changed periodically.

By the time of Alexander the Great in the 300s BC, the Gold/Silver ratio had shifted to 1:13. Mining techniques had advanced at that point, so the ancients were able to produce higher volumes of silver than ever before.

Under Julius Caesar in Ancient Rome, one ounce of gold was worth 12 ounces of silver. In the time of Mohammed  and the early days of the Islamic Caliphate in the 600s, the ratio was 1:16.

Even in the early history of the United States, the Mint and Coinage Act of 1792 established a gold/silver ratio of 1:15.

(According to the law, one US dollar is defined as 1.604 grams of pure gold, or 24.1 grams of pure silver. So those pieces of paper in your wallet are not technically US dollars, but ‘Federal Reserve Notes’.)

In our modern times, the ratio average is around 55 ounces of silver per ounce of gold.

Much of this is due to continual improvements in mining techniques-- it’s a lot easier to mine than it was 5,000 years ago, so the ratio is more indicative of the natural abundance of these metals in the Earth’s crust.

But the gold/silver ratio also fluctuates from time to time based on market conditions.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

 https://www.sovereignman.com/international-diversification-strategies/start-thinking-about-silver-before-it-becomes-popular-again-26067/

Gold Storm On Its Way

Gold Storm On Its Way

The Final Wake Up Call By Peter B Meyer

Gold-Backed Financial Systems Are Invulnerable

The End Of The Global Monetary Debt-Money System Is In Sight

Hugh Debt Burdens Hinder The Purchase Of Precious Metals

Gold And Silver Are Real Money And Going To Shine

The Crime Against Humanity

Consider, all people live in a world of lies and deception, they eat poisoned food, that makes them sick, they go to a doctor to receive dangerous medication making them even sicker, falling ever deeper into the hands of the medical mafia and remaining there until they die in utter poverty, totally fleeced by the Deep State insiders.

In the elite’s opinion; retired people are ‘useless eaters’ and must be made ‘economically productive’ by feeding them Deep State sponsored medicine, through bribed medical practitioners, to keep them generating a profit for them.

 Money is simply a medium of exchange and must have the function of a medium of exchange, by unit measure, and of a store of value. This is now most certainly not the case, as we are forced to use worthless money, in addition to the fact that it is used to fleece and bribe everyone at will.

Money should be based on natural characteristics, such as the fact that it is intrinsically valuable, durable, divisible, uniform, portable, scarce, and broadly accepted; these characteristics are essential for a medium of exchange to become an honest standard of widely accepted payment.

Think about it; Gold has always been valuable, while debt is someone else’s burden, with unreliable promises attached, which could end up not being honoured. Money backed by debt is a crime against humanity. It is a Rothschild invention, which maintains that money is a flow of energy generated from raw materials, goods and services, while labour is the key to all activity on Earth.

In order to achieve a monopoly over all the energy, the Rothschilds implemented a world system of slave labour by issuing debt money through their privately-owned central banking system, that has permeated the whole world. This money flow creates for them a first strike opportunity in the field of economics.

By bribing governments, they are able to fleece the outsiders of their valuable energy output, hereby filling the pockets of a few insiders. Money created out of nothing, backed by debt should not be allowed to purchase valuables, as it is plain fraud. But as long the illusion is kept alive that debt-money has value, and we the sheeple believe in this fantasy, this fraud will continue.

 Gold-Backed Financial Systems Are Invulnerable

What are the advantages of gold-backed monetary systems? The first little-understood advantage is that gold-backed financial systems are almost completely immune to any large-scale booms or busts. That’s because the supply of credit is strictly regulated by the size of the economy. Bankers are limited by their gold reserves from granting too many loans.

Central Banks are making the economy worse instead of improving it; while they have simultaneously dropped interest rates to zero and recently into negative territory in the 9 years following the ’08-crisis. But, they have also employed quantitative easing, or QE.

This is quite simply put, the printing of more money, which they ran for 3 rounds, and which they are now starting a bold fourth round, constituting brazen bond buying to keep pumping more liquidity into the economy.

So, after a brief and insincere flirtation with “normalcy,” the Fed is definitely back to its old, corrupt tricks of robbing the middle classes in order to reward the rich. The nice thing about it is that it is all predictable.

More fake new money. More debt. Crazier booms, with terrifying busts. And of course more inflation, with no one on the horizon to straighten this baloney out.

The announced QE4 will involve buying toxic assets from 4 Failing “Too Big to Fail” banks at face value. That is going to transit the market into Exponential Bailout territory, heralding an additional $20 trillion bank bailout in November 2019.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

http://finalwakeupcall.info/en/2019/10/30/gold-storm-on-its-way/

Gold Price Could Really Soar Over the Next Two Years

Notes From The Field By Simon Black

October 14, 2019   San Juan, Puerto Rico

Gold Price Could Really Soar Over the Next Two Years

Here’s why

At some point between the years 1483 and 1485, a Genoese businessman named Cristoffa Corombo had the opportunity to pitch his idea to King John II of Portugal.

This period was the dawn of what historians call the ‘Age of Discovery,’ a time when European explorers sailed all over the world opening new trade routes.

They were the tech entrepreneurs of their day, famous for their bold, absurdly expensive, and extremely high-risk ideas that often ended in catastrophic failure (or the mental/physical enslavement of countless people).

Due to the risky nature of these expeditions, the medieval ‘venture capitalists’ who backed them were typically royal governments.

There was an Arms Race of sorts emerging in the 1400s among European kingdoms to lay claim to overseas territories before anyone else had the opportunity.

And Portugal had the early lead-- they were Silicon Valley. Prince Henry the Navigator had explored parts of the Atlantic and West Africa as early as the 1430s.

Corombo knew this. And that’s why he approached the King of Portugal first with a proposal: a twelve month voyage to cross the Atlantic, reach Asia, and return to Portugal.

The King was intrigued. But his advisers ultimately rejected the idea, believing that Corombo’s projections were way off, and that the venture was too expensive and risky.

So Corombo turned to the recently unified Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in modern-day Spain.

Back then, Spain was like China today: it was rising rapidly, and everyone knew that Spain would eventually be the dominant superpower.

It took several years. But finally in 1492, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela funded Corombo’s venture. (Obviously we know him today as Columbus.)

And while his four main voyages to the Americas failed to achieve what he or his backers hoped, Columbus did at least demonstrate that there was tremendous potential across the Atlantic.

So Spain kept sending ships and financing new expeditions. And within 50 years, they controlled nearly all of modern-day Latin America.

The biggest prize for Spain in its rich new territories were the gold and silver mines.

The Spanish government kept careful records of the mines’ output, and modern historians estimate that tens of millions of kilograms of gold and silver were mined-- worth potentially several trillion dollars in today’s money.

It was from all of this vast precious metals wealth that Spain became the dominant power in Europe, following the age-old Golden Rule: ‘He who has the gold makes the rules.’

Today our system is completely different; we’ve awarded dictatorial control of our money to a committee of unelected bureaucrats who conjure trillions of dollars, euros, yen, etc. out of thin air in their sole discretion.

Just a few days ago, the Federal Reserve announced plans to print $60 billion per month and loan it to the US government.

What value can money really have when it can be created from nothing and loaned, practically for free, to the federal government?

Were you or I to do this, we would go to prison on counterfeit charges. When the central bank does this it’s called ‘Quantitative Easing’.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.sovereignman.com/investing/heres-why-the-gold-price-could-really-soar-over-the-next-two-years-25846/

Gold’s Long-Term Gains Outperformed Warren Buffett

Notes From The Field By Simon Black

October 7, 2019  Santiago, Chile

Gold’s Long-Term Gains Have Even Outperformed Warren Buffett...

Warren Buffett, despite his extraordinary investment success, has a rather famous and long-standing love/hate relationship with precious metals.

Maybe it started with his dad-- Congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska-- who, as a staunch advocate for the gold standard, argued to his colleagues on Capitol Hill that “paper money systems have always wound up with collapse and economic chaos.”

Warren himself acquired a record-setting 128 million ounces of silver back in the late 1990s… which he later sold at a profit in the early 2000s.

But to listen to him talk about precious metals these days, he’s always negative.

Buffett often quips that if you took the world’s entire supply of gold and melted it together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet (~21 meters) per side and be worth around $9 trillion.

With that same $9 trillion, you could buy every share of Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Exxon Mobil, all the farmland in the United States, all the developable land in Manhattan, and still have more than a trillion dollars left over.

This is Buffett’s central argument: gold doesn’t produce anything. So it’s much better to invest in a productive asset like a business, farmland, etc.

Sure, I’d rather own a profitable, productive asset than a pile of metal.

But Buffett is completely wrong to compare gold to productive assets… they’re apples and oranges.

Gold isn’t an ‘investment’. It’s an insurance policy against paper currencies losing value over time. So a MUCH better comparison for gold is CASH.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/golds-long-term-gains-have-even-outperformed-warren-buffett-25699/

To your freedom & prosperity, Simon Black Founder, SovereignMan.com

Why Gold is Money: A Periodic Perspective

Why Gold is Money: A Periodic Perspective

July 4, 2019 By Nicholas LePan

Why Gold is Money

Gold has been used as money for millennia. People often attribute this to beauty, but there are basic physical properties for why gold is money.

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously called gold a “barbarous relic”, suggesting that its usefulness as money is an artifact of the past. In an era filled with cashless transactions and hundreds of cryptocurrencies, this statement seems truer today than in Keynes’ time.

 However, gold also possesses elemental properties that has made it an ideal metal for money throughout history.

Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer from Columbia University, broke down the periodic table to show why gold has been used as a monetary metal for thousands of years. 

The Periodic Table

The periodic table organizes 118 elements in rows by increasing atomic number (periods) and columns (groups) with similar electron configurations.

Just as in today’s animation, let’s apply the process of elimination to the periodic table to see why gold is money:

Gases and Liquids

Noble gases (such as argon and helium), as well as elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine and chlorine are gaseous at room temperature and standard pressure. Meanwhile, mercury and bromine are liquids. As a form of money, these are implausible and impractical.

Lanthanides and Actinides

Next, lanthanides and actinides are both generally elements that can decay and become radioactive. If you were to carry these around in your pocket they could irradiate or poison you.

Alkali and Alkaline-Earth Metals

Alkali and alkaline earth metals are located on the left-hand side of the periodic table, and are highly reactive at standard pressure and room temperature. Some can even burst into flames.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/why-gold-is-money-a-periodic-perspective/

The Silver Series: The Start of A New Gold-Silver Cycle

The Silver Series: The Start of A New Gold-Silver Cycle

September 11, 2019By Nicholas LePan

As the decade-long bull run shows signs of slowing, is it time for precious metals to shine? Here’s why it could be the start of a new gold-silver cycle.

The world has experienced a decade of growth fueled by record-low interest rates, a burgeoning money supply, and historic debt levels – but the good times only last so long.

As the global economy slows and eventually begins to retract, can precious metals offer a useful store of value to investors?

Part 1: The Start of a New Cycle

Today’s infographic comes to us from Endeavour Silver, and it outlines some key indicators that precede a coming gold-silver cycle in which exposure to hard assets may help to protect wealth.

The Start of a New Gold-Silver Cycle

Bankers Blowing Bubbles

Since 2008, central bankers around the world launched a historic market intervention by printing money and bailing out major banks. With cheap and abundant money, this strategy worked so well that it created a bull market in every sector — except for precious metals.

Stock markets, consumer lending, and property values surged. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s assets ballooned, and so did corporate, government, and household debt. By 2018, total debt reached almost $250 trillion worldwide.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-silver-series-the-start-of-a-new-gold-silver-cycle/

The Gold Series: The History of Gold

The Gold Series: The History of Gold

May 30, 2012 By Jeff Desjardins

 Wars have been fought over gold. Love has been expressed by it. Gold has changed the landscape of civilizations and the world.

But what makes gold so great? This infographic examines the history of gold from ancient history to the gold rushes of the centuries ago. It looks at its properties and how it became not only a currency, but the gold standard.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

The Gold Series: The History of Gold (Part 1)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gold-series-history-gold/

The Gold Series: Mining and Supply (Part 2)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gold-series-mining-supply-part-2/

The Gold Series: Uses and Demand (Part 3)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gold-series-uses-demand-part-3/

The Gold Series: Gold as an Investment (Part 4)

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gold-series-gold-investment-part-4/

A Chemist Explains Why Gold Beat Out Lithium, Osmium, Einsteinium

A Chemist Explains Why Gold Beat Out Lithium, Osmium, Einsteinium ...

November 19, 2010   Jacob Goldstein & David Kestenbaum

The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.

Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium?

We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn't work as money.

The periodic table looks kind of like a bingo card. Each square has a different element in it — one for carbon, another for gold, and so on.

Sanat Kumar, with table. 

Sanat starts with the far-right column of the table. The elements there have a really appealing characteristic: They're not going to change. They're chemically stable.

But there's also a big drawback: They're gases. You could put all your gaseous money in a jar, but if you opened the jar, you'd be broke. So Sanat crosses out the right-hand column.

Then he swings over to the far left-hand column, and points to one of the elements there: Lithium

"If you expose lithium to air, it will cause a huge fire that can burn through concrete walls," he says.

Money that spontaneously bursts into flames is clearly a bad idea. In fact, you don't want your money undergoing any kind of spontaneous chemical reactions. And it turns out that a lot of the elements in the periodic table are pretty reactive.

Not all of them burst into flames. But sometimes they corrode, start to fall apart.

So Sanat crosses out another 38 elements, because they're too reactive.

Then we ask him about those two weird rows at the bottom of the table. They're always broken out separately from the main table, and they have some great names — promethium, einsteinium.

But it turns out they're radioactive — put some einsteinium in your pocket, and a year later, you'll be dead.

So we're down from 118 elements to 30, and we've come up with a list of three key requirements:

Not a gas.

Doesn't corrode or burst into flames

Doesn't kill you.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:  

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131430755/a-chemist-explains-why-gold-beat-out-lithium-osmium-einsteinium

We Bought Gold!

We Bought Gold!

PLANET MONEY October 15, 2010  David Kestenbaum & Jacob Goldstein

 We Buy Gold

Our recent investment in a toxic asset didn't go so well: We started out with $1,000 and wound up with $449.06.

The price of gold has been going through the roof lately, and we wanted to know why. You can't eat gold, or use it to fuel your car. Why do people pay so much for it?

So we thought we'd try it for ourselves; we decided to buy gold with the money we had left over from our toxic asset.

In New York's Diamond District, a few blocks from our office, we found a place listed on the U.S. Mint's website. It's not really a store in the ordinary sense of the word. It's more like a food court — a room with stall after stall of guys selling jewelry and gold.

One stall has two guys, and a piece of paper taped to the wall. The paper says "Gold Standard," which is the name of the business.

The guy who runts runs it, Hank Mendelsohn, has been here since the '70's. He got his start going around to dentists' offices, buying teeth with gold fillings.

For Hank, the spike in gold prices has been good for business. One time, he says, a hedge fund wired him hundreds of thousands of dollars, then sent an armored car to pick up the gold.

After showing us a few things out of our price range — a bar of gold about the size of a chocolate bar ($42,000), a nice one-ounce coin ($1,400) — Hank pulls out shiny thin coin a little bigger than a nickel. It's ours for $419.

Lots of people have been buying gold lately — the price has doubled in the past three years. And everyone will give you a reason why.

A big one is just history. People say gold has been valuable for thousands of years, so it seems like a safe bet that it will still be valuable tomorrow, and next year.

On the other hand, a lot of people say we're in the middle of a gold bubble. And it's a weird feeling handing it over a jar of cash for this tiny piece of metal.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/130575234/we-bought-gold

.Crypto-Fiat Currency is a Disaster for Your Privacy

Crypto-Fiat Currency is a Disaster for Your Privacy

By Chris Lowe, Editor, Inner Circle Sep 12, 2019, 8:08 am EDT

We’re not the first to worry about financial privacy in a digital world

Imagine a new type of cash…

Unlike the kind you carry in your wallet, it exists only in digital form.

There’s no more need for ATMs. Tip jars are a thing of the past. Even vending machines are digital.

Every time you spend money, it’s through a digital app. And it’s recorded in a government database.

The feds collect and store details on every transaction you make. They also know exactly where you are in the world every time you buy something.

In today’s dispatch, I (Chris) will show you why this scenario is already becoming a reality around the world… and why it’s a disaster if you value your liberty.

Then tomorrow, we’ll look at why it’s coming to America… and what you can do about it.

We’re not the first to worry about financial privacy in a digital world…

A pioneering computer scientist called Paul Armer sounded the alarm on this back in the 1970s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Armer headed the computer science departments at the RAND Corporation think tank and at Stanford University.

Then, in 1975, he issued a chilling warning about what would happen to our privacy if governments ditched physical cash and moved to a purely digital money system.

In an article titled “Computer Technology and Surveillance,” Armer said such a system would become a powerful surveillance tool for the state.

This wasn’t lost on the KGB….

In 1971, Russia’s secret police tasked a group of advisors to devise a plan.

KGB higher-ups wanted to figure out how to create a surveillance system that would keep track of everyone inside the U.S.S.R. without them knowing about it.

The computer scientists’ proposed solution was to get rid of physical cash and replace it with digital currency transactions. As Armer wrote…

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://investorplace.com/2019/09/crypto-fiat-currency-is-a-disaster-for-your-privacy-lrg/

.The Most Profitable Business In The World

Notes From The Field By Simon Black

September 16, 2019  Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico

The Most Profitable Business In The World

More than 5,000 years ago on a hilltop located in modern-day Georgia (the country, not the state), a group of people from the prehistoric Kura-Araxes civilization gathered their primitive tools and began to dig.

It took years. But they eventually burrowed 20 meters deep into the earth and constructed a network of elaborate tunnels.

Thousands of years later, archaeologists and geologists figured out why: the Kura-Araxes were digging for gold.

And that site, known as Sakdrisi-Kachagiani, is the oldest gold mine in the world. It predates Ancient Egypt and even Mesopotamia.

And it shows that, even in prehistoric times, our early ancestors valued gold.

Nearly every great civilization from every corner of the planet since then has continued to mine for gold-- from Greece and Rome to China’s Zhou dynasty in the first millennium BC, to the Inca and Aztec.

Mining was so important in ancient times, in fact, that wars frequently broke out over control of the best-producing mines.

In many respects, a gold mine is the ultimate asset. Even to this day we still use the term ‘gold mine’ to refer to a fantastic investment.

And obviously gold mines themselves can be phenomenal investments.

We’ve been talking about gold a lot lately and discussing different ways to own it. I’ve encouraged you to avoid buying into a gold ETF, and instead to buy the most prominent physical coins (like Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins).

But one very interesting (and completely different) way to invest in gold is to buy shares of mining companies.

Mining companies generate profit based on the difference between their mining costs and mining revenue.

So as the price of gold increases, mining company profits tend to increase as well, pushing their stock prices higher.

Among miners, the largest are known as the ‘majors’ or ‘senior producers’, including companies like Goldcorp, Kinross Gold, Barrick Gold, Newcrest Mining, Gold Fields, etc.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://www.sovereignman.com/investing/the-most-profitable-business-in-the-world-25570/

To your freedom & prosperity, Simon Black Founder, SovereignMan.com