Against the Wishes of the Power Elite

A Gold Economy Begins

by Bill Sardi

Recently by Bill Sardi: Living in the Economic Past

Sometimes what is happening before our very eyes escapes recognition — that a major change in modern American society is underway.

For example, when Starbucks Coffee Company went public in 1992 with an existing chain of 165 coffee shops and a track record of success, who would have guessed a revolution was underway — that Americans would begin paying $3—4 for a hot cup of java instead of 10-cents for a cup of mud.

Anybody who would have invested in Starbucks early on would have seen the value of its stock rise and rise, as the chain grew to 11,000 stores in the U.S. and over 17,000 worldwide. Starbucks wasn’t just a business success, nor was it just a change in America’s choice of hot beverage — it was a social revolution that signaled a departure from hanging out at bars to drink booze.

With the Starbucks revolution in mind, I’m chatting with a web designer on the telephone. He says he is doing design work for a man who has ownership in five pawn shops in the Bahamas which are doing a booming business in gold reclamation from jewelry. The pawn shops are generating $50,000 of income per month. More pawn shops are planned for the Bahamas and another pawn shop is soon to open in Greece.

I also learn my neighbor’s brother has left the U.S. for the Republic of Mali, a West African country that is now teeming with gold mining villages. He is supplying gold reclamation and refining equipment, along with medicines and food, to entire villages that now devote their whole economy to above-ground gold reclamation. Semi-refined gold bars are then purchased from village chieftains and shipped to Europe or the U.S. for final refining and sale to mints.

Gold now represents 80% of Mali’s exports. A story of how gold panning is sweeping the Sudan, another struggling African country, also recently made the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

Buying and selling gold enters the American home, and Main Street

My mother-in-law recently attended an in-home gold party where women bring gold jewelry to be assayed. It’s analyzed and weighed and cash money is paid on the spot. Gold parties are operated like Tupperware parties and have attracted the attention of the news media.

A new sign hanging in the window of most jewelry stores these days says "We Buy Gold."

A couple of months ago I bought a tanzanite anniversary ring for my wife and while I was in the jewelry shop buying the ring, four or five people walked in with gold jewelry asking for an estimation of value. (Two of the people who brought jewelry to the store found they were holding brass or plated gold jewelry, not solid 14- or 18-carat gold as they had thought.) It’s obvious, jewelry stores are generating traffic as buyers rather than sellers of gold.

A few months ago a friend handed me a gift, a 1-ounce oval ball that appeared to be gold. I thanked him for it and laid it aside. When I visited my jeweler I had him test it. It was brass. I never said a thing to my friend and hoped he had not purchased it as gold. My point here is that I wasn’t given an expensive wrist watch or box seats to a sporting event. I was given gold, or in this instance, what was thought to be gold.

USA Today says Americans are beginning to pan for gold. Many Americans have time on their hands, being unemployed or underemployed. Gold panning takes a lot of effort and time and can be marginally profitable. But the rising price of gold makes it look more and more appealing every day. They’re calling it the second California gold rush.

Gold vending machine

Touch-screen gold-vending machines, which let customers purchase solid 24K-gold bar cards of preferred weight and size, using cash or credit card as payment, will soon be installed in Las Vegas Hotels, casinos, cruise lines, airports, malls, department stores and jewelry stores, says a recent report.

We see other changes, from the top to the bottom of the economic ladder, in the world at large:

Harrods in London, known as the world’s most famous luxury department store, has begun selling gold bullion (bars).

Harrod’s even sells gold bullion online.

Gold sales have emerged at the lower end of the economic chain. Street vendors were recently caught selling fake gold.

If you can’t make a profit buying or selling gold

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s sawmill on the American River in 1848 sparked the California Gold Rush. But John Sutter didn’t make his money with gold, he is reported to have made most of his money selling shovels.

So today all manner of soil sifting, gold finding and gold testing equipment is now being briskly sold. Gold testers are widely sold, even at Amazon.com. Books are being written on how to invest in gold and silver, how to pan for gold, and how to join prospectors clubs.

Americans are kinda-getting the message.

The percentage of Americans buying gold hasn’t increased dramatically; it is still a miniscule percentage of the overall population. However, at one point demand was so overwhelming the U.S. Mint ran out of gold coins.

Investment counselors have finally conceded that 5 to 10 percent of a person’s investment portfolio maybe ought to be invested in gold. Gary North provides some of the best information on why gold and silver coins should be a part of every American’s investment portfolio. You can find his information here.

If employers had the best interests of their employees in mind they would start gold purchase programs for them instead of the increasingly risky tax-deferred 401(k) plans that may not even be accessible in a financial crisis.

The flimsy whim of confidence upon which paper money stands compared to the historical status of gold, which IS money, suggests at least a parallel currency is emerging, and it glitters, is in limited supply, and is unlike US dollars that are being fabricated faster than ever imagined.

In Greece, now under economic reorganization, the banks there sell gold, and they are reported to be asking $500 more than the spot (selling) price of gold (presently ~$1700 an ounce). Should the published spot price for gold in the world reach $1700 an ounce, millions more people worldwide will be lured into buying, selling, mining, and telling others how to profit from the shiny stuff.

At some point, there is no turning back. When enough Americans, and people worldwide, begin to depend upon gold for an income, it will be very tenuous for politicians to do what they did in 1933, which was to confiscate gold. Confiscation of gold could eliminate many jobs — a precious commodity these days.

Gold is edging its way into American society, initially not as a substitute for spending money, but as a medium of wealth preservation for the well-to-do and a way to pay bills for the poor. Slowly, surely, America is changing, not just shifting from saving paper money to storing gold, but to a gold-based economy.

This must infuriate bankers who want Americans to store their paper money in the bank where it can be used in their fractional system, a system that gives banksters the un-codified right to make money out of thin air.

Starbucks represented a safer place to socialize than bars. Similarly, gold represents a safer medium of exchange for our labors than paper money. Just as Starbucks represented a social change as to where Americans hung out socially, the return of gold as money represents a shift away from America’s blind faith in government.

All the obstructionist efforts by the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury Department and banks, to diminish the value of gold, and to ignore its importance, will be overcome by market forces.

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