GOLD RUSH

This is what I wrote in 2005 about the villain (Mike) of my fourth novel, FATAL GREED:

Mike spent the following week revisiting the coin dealers he had contacted … and gave them individual lists of gold coins he wished to purchase, figuring that with gold at three hundred dollars an ounce, for seven hundred thousand dollars he would have to purchase about two thousand four hundred gold coins, weighing approximately seventy kilos in total.

Mike planned to hide the coins on board his yacht and leave England for Costa Rica where he figured he’d chill out for a while.GOLD AT $300 AN OUNCE – SIX SHORT YEARS AGO!Today it’s above $1,500.

So what happened?
The US Treasury started printing money like crazy, that’s what happened.

The idea behind this move is the belief that printing more money would help the US to finance itself out of the present economic crisis.

Problem is that the oil-producing nations have begun thinking seriously about not accepting US Dollars anymore in payment for their petroleum products.

In other words, the US Dollar is in danger of losing its status as the currency of international debt settlement. Instead Europe, Russia and China are proposing a ‘basket’ of currencies which they might call the ‘Banko’ with which they intend to replace the petro-dollar.

And when this happens, watch out – gold will shoot up to US $3,000 per ounce.

The rush for gold is already on. People are concerned about the economic uncertainty to the point where they want to hold the metal itself, not the certificates.

Which means that the places where you can leave your metal for safekeeping are becoming more and more hard to find.

As if all this were not bad enough, let me tell you the following story:

A jeweler’s heirs are fighting the United States government for the right to keep a batch of rare and valuable “Double Eagle” $20 coins that date back to the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Philadelphian Joan Langbord and her sons say they found the 10 coins in 2003 in a bank deposit box kept by Langbord’s father, Israel Switt, a jeweler who died in 1990. But when they tried to have the haul authenticated by the U.S. Treasury, the feds, um, flipped.
Source: Yahoo

More from the Associated Press:

Treasury officials charge that the never-circulated “double eagles” were stolen from the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1933. They could be worth $80 million or more, given that one sold for nearly $7.6 million in 2002.

The coins come from a batch that were struck but melted down after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard in 1933.

Two were preserved for the Smithsonian Institute. But a handful more mysteriously got out.
The daughter and grandsons of Israel Switt, a jeweler and scrap metal dealer on nearby Jeweler’s Row, say they discovered 10 of them in his bank deposit box in 2003.

Joan Langbord of Philadelphia and her sons went to the U.S. Treasury to authenticate the coins, but the government instead seized them. Authorities noted that the box was rented six years after Switt died in 1990, and that the family never paid inheritance taxes on them.

What’s more, the Secret Service has long believed Switt and a corrupt cashier at the Mint were somehow involved in the double-eagle breach.

While the Treasury’s position is understandable with regards to the coins being stolen, unless they have direct evidence of these specific coins being linked to theft and Switt’s involvement (which is circumstantial at best) then these coins belong to the Langbord family.

Author: Mac Slavo
Date: July 7th, 2011