Monday 18 January 2010

'Bling Bling, Blag Blag' a Guest Post from B the Panda




Hello and Happy New Year from Bugger (the Panda) to all my fellow Scots and others who really want to be Scottish. That lets out SME 753 and an assorted Rag, Tag and Bobtail of others.


Sitting in my zoo den trying to read the China Morning Post under this bloody dim 20 watt eco-lightbulb, specially put here by my keepers to take the wee-wee out of the tourists and stop me reading too much, I have been thinking, as you do, about assorted scams, frauds and money trees.


Something I have been seeing on ITV has been lurking in the back of my head for months and now it all beginning to make sense. I can watch BBC (London region), ITV (Manchester), Channels 4 and 5 and a whole host of pornography on my notebook computer, which is in my office hidden from the zoo visitors, behind my public bamboo room. I use FilmOn for free

http://filmon.net/news.html


I have been wondering why there is a spate of used goldbuying adverts on TV these days and they seem to be breeding as much as government elfinsafety and scary global warming propaganda fillums. How come these buyers can be buying all that broken gold and be making a profit? Well it is pretty obvious, even to a Panda without an MBA that they are offering crap prices and selling on at higher ones but, the market doesn’t seem to be falling off and there seems to be a real need more and more gold. OK, maybe they know that soon enough the £ the, the € and the $ are all going to be worth less than a wheelbarrow full of bamboo shoots and so gold is where lies safety but, silver doesn’t seem to be following gold at least to the same extent although, some weeks it jumps faster than gold.


I have a theory and if you can relax I will let it unfold for you. It is a brammer, as we Pandas say in Sunny Govan.


Gold really doesn’t have much practical use, unlike silver and platinum. It is the scarcity value and its historical associations that drive its price and value. Gold is used as THE guarantee of a currency’s worth, even today. Governments, international agencies, private organisations and even individuals buy and sell it, day in and day out.


So there I was chewing on a bamboo shoot when the SKYPE bell rang on my laptop. It was second cousin, once removed, Oui-Oui, ‘phoning from the Hong Kong Zoo. She told me a tale going the rounds down there of some fake gold bars.


It appears, nothing is ever cast on gold here in China, that the Chinese Government had received some gold from the US Treasury after cashing in some trillions of dollars. They had assayed some of the gold bars and found them to be fakes. The ingots looked, felt and weighed exactly as they should but, when drilled the core was found to be tungsten and not gold. Tungsten is almost identical in density to gold and a core of tungsten layered on the outside with 10 or 20% real gold would be impossible to detect without cutting the ingot open.

Density of gold = 19.32g/cc

Density of tungsten = 19.35g/cc

Even if you did so, you would need to “assay” in this manner a statistical number of them of the 5,700 shipped. Would you, unless you had copper bottomed suspicions?

This is not the first time that fake ingots have been bought by Governments, as South Africa reportedly bought gold from the Ethiopian Government that turned out to be Lead based and easily identifiable as so by way of its density. They sent the gold back.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm


Now China is the home of World Wide Fakery and the obvious source of the scam would have to be China, which is also the source of most of the World’s tungsten. This is where it all gets bit hazy.


The Chinese say the ingots came from Fort Knox. Enter the conspiracists, and you takes your choice from the bounteous plate of alternatives.


The Chinese are the best in the World at faking everything and they are the number one both in Tungsten production and consumption. However, the take from China is that the fake ingots were from the US official stocks and that much, much more of the stuff is sitting in various vaults.


The theory is that some 15 years ago over 1 million tungsten blanks were manufactured in the USA and over 600,000 of these were plated with gold and incorporated into the vaults at Fort Knox. This would place it in the time of Clinton and Gore. The rest were coated and sold globally.

http://gold-quote.net/en/articles/fake-tungsten-gold-bars.php


In 2004 The Times reported a “nothing to get worried about so move on please” piece about the “degradation” of some ingots in the Bank of England vaults. Pure gold doesn’t degrade but impure gold bars could.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article2554723.ece

It was just some cracking and purely superficial, not affecting the purity of the ingots, they said. As such the bars could not be traded as they are not in mint condition but could be re-smelted and turned into new gold bars. So, why didn’t they do that?


These gold bars were imported apparently from the USA during the 1930s and 1940s which suggests that they arrived during WW2. I thought most of the UK gold reserves were spirited away during WW2 and hidden in The Bank of Canada vaults in Montreal? I also thought that far from shipping gold in during this period we were shipping it out to pay for American arms and food.


Anyway, moving on we see that tungsten gold bars have been surfacing other places from as far back as 1983. In that year in Austria 5 men were arrested for trying to pass off 10 such fakes as real gold. These fakes even had detailed numbering that corresponded to gold bars stolen just a few days earlier that year from Heathrow Airport.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/22/world/austrians-seize-false-gold-tied-to-london-bullion-theft.html


So where are we now?


We know that fake tungsten based gold bars exist.

It looks as though some of the gold from the Heathrow gold bullion robbery in 1983 almost certainly was tungsten fakes.

So what?


If there is a lot of fake gold out there, who did it and why?


Why is easy, to create money or back up declared wealth.


Who, could be anybody from the Chinese to organised (very) crime organisations or politicians, which is essentially the same as organised criminals these days.


If it is governments covering up for economic problems they would be stuck with fakes forever unless they could unload it onto some other schmuk before the fakes were rumbled.


Now, what was almost the first act of James Gordon Brown’s tenure at No 11 Downing Street?



He announced that he was going to sell off half of the UK’s gold reserves! The market dived and still Brown persisted to sell of the gold at a price way below he could have achieved by drip feeding it into the market. At the time it was viewed to be a colossal stupidity but, maybe it was not that at all and was a cover to dump the fake gold into the market in one go so, that the schmuks in the feeding frenzy couldn’t believe their luck. The gold would then have been quickly sold on and dissipated worldwide. Much of it could have been turned into Indian jewellery, which is already mixed with other metals. I don’t think that Brown has the wit to concoct that scheme but the Treasury and the Bank of England does.


Jonah Brown, as ever was the fall guy?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/4162054/Gordon-Browns-decision-to-sell-half-of-the-UKs-gold-reserves-cost-UK-5billion.html


Interestingly, the IMF is doing just the same thing right now with some of their reserves.

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2009/pr09310.htm


What does Bugger (the Panda) think?


I think it was all due to Al Gore. He was in on the original scam to load up Fort Knox and now he has created the Global Warming Scam and Carbon Offsets to fund the purchase of the real broken gold. He is behind all these buyback TV adverts!


He is laundering his ill gotten gains in the World gold market under our very noses.


He also still owes me a cheque for my royalties on the WWFund logo and another one for the money I invested in his Carbon Offset trades scheme and Vat Carousel Fraud scam.


I’m waiting Big Al, for you to fetch up in Shanghai and I’m gonnae chib ye!


Me, I’ve bought gold mining shares and real silver ingots.


Don’t ever tell me that I didn’t warn you.


Bugger (the Panda)


19 comments:

Oldrightie said...

People have gone to war over smaller scams than this, my charming bear.

Anonymous said...

War, but only if the scam is found out and who would ever expect Fort Knox, The US Treasury and the Bank of England to be armpit deep in such a fraud?

You buy, take possession, note the paperwork is order, see above, weight it and then just store and forget about it.

If you read the London Gold Delivery conditions they guarantee nowt.

Caveat Emptor, not My Word Is My Bond.

It makes a good blog, bling and blag, OR?

McGonagall said...

This story would make a great book/film.

Anonymous said...

Could you put up the money?

The Italian Job, the original one with Michael Cane would be a suitable template?

How is Ontario right now, Scunert?

subrosa said...

Super post Bug. I doubt if Brown had the courage to get rid if our bullion was plated tungsten, but if he was pressurised by the Bank of England who knows.

It's one of these stories which initially sounds like a piece of fiction but historically will prove to be true.

McGonagall said...

Bugger - it's quite mild in this part of Ontario at the moment. Up north it's a different story.

Stewart Cowan said...

Nice post. Brown is so dishonest, I'm sure he wouldn't lose any sleep over such a scam.

Anyway, you've got me worried about those krugerrands I bought off of ebay...

Anonymous said...

Stewart,

I think there is ore chance that your Krugerrands are "kosher."

They are die stamped and not cast. thus there are a whole host of ways, for an expert, to discern whether they are copies.

If you bought the on e-bay well, was it for less than €5 each?

On e-bay as everywhere else, if it seems to good to be true it is too good to be true.


Okrams Razor?

Anonymous said...

Apparently so.

Gedguy said...

If this is true then I'm going back to my dentist to get him to check the quality of my teeth.

Anonymous said...

Maybe you'd be better with Tungsten on Tungsten Carbide, like the drills, fillings.

Jaws 2?

Apogee said...

Good story, could be made into a good novel. Gave me a good laugh as I read it, an even bigger laugh when I thought about it and realised all the implications. Had heard over many years rumours about this kind of thing going on but who would ever admit to it.
Then again, look at the recorded history of the Fed Reserve Bank in the States.....and you wonder.

D.

Crinkly & Ragged Arsed Philosophers said...

Oh you are a Bugger. For crooks principles are there to be broken or taken advantage of - so why not!

We deserve what we get when we aspire to know the price of everything and become blinded to knowing the values that really matter.

Problem is weight for weight gold is now the reserve riches for the proles compared to the values of the rare earth minerals.

A market that China has been quietly monopolising for the last 25 years.

But hey; whenever have they allowed fact to get in the way of profitable fiction.

Anonymous said...

Dear Ragged Arse

If I knew what you menat I would probably agree but I know buggerall as I a only a Panda, albeit a Manged Arse as well.

May you have loads of succulent bamboo shoots this year!

But mining shares, reputable ones mind and oil shares as well.

Get out of the £ and the $ and the €

SFR for liquidity

Regards

Bugger (the Panda)

Anonymous said...

Raged Arse

Come to think of it, the whole thing could be a ruse to drop the price of gold by inducing uncertainty.

I still blame Al Gore though.

banned said...

If money only works because we all pretend to trust it and that it is backed up by gold deposits; what happens when we can't pretend to believe that anymore?

Anonymous said...

Bamboo shoot are holding up well on the Chengdu Futures Market.

Anonymous said...

Maybe carrots and bamboo futures for you Banned?

Buy them by the barrow load.

That's the economy fixed, what is next?

Gordon Brown? Even I could fix that one, except with a Purdy.

Crinkly & Ragged Arsed Philosophers said...

Come'n Bugger, Panda's know all about rare earth's; it's in their genes.

I got out of all the markets in the early eighties when I realised monopoly notes had more inherent value and gave far more honest pleasure than the official varieties.

And Banned; all we have to do is dream up another myth to keep the masses dumb on its opiate.

Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and religion they are all only Acts and scenes - here today but gone in some tomorrow - hopefully not too far off.

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