Japan ain't playing. Trump threatened them with tarriffs and now they are offloading their US treasury bonds. Ooops

[DFW]

20. Gold has now been at over $3000 an ounce for a solid week.

Totally nuts. Here in Europe (and no doubt in the USA as well, soon if not already) thieves are grabbing gold chains off women's neck in public to the point where many don't wear them in public any more. They just put them on inside the restaurant or event after they arrive. Ripping a chain off some woman's neck was petty stuff when all the thief could get for it was $40 or so. Now, at about $100 a gram, a 5 gram chain is worth the effort, with very little risk of getting caught, and, at least in most of Europe, no chance of prosecution even if they ARE caught.

Investment marketers in the States that used to sell old $20 gold pieces at $900 each when gold was at $750 used to do quite a regular business selling to the public. For a normal mortal with a little cash to invest, he could buy five of these coins for under $5000. Now? Now it would cost $15,000! People do not have three times the pocket money they did ten years ago, and there are just as many coins around on the market as they were then. I've heard that some dealers are choking on their inventory, and even melting coins that are of lesser states of preservation--unheard of just a few years ago.

There used to be a few outfits in China that were doing perfect copies of 100 gram gold bars with a 1mm layer of .9999 gold on the outside, but tungsten on the inside. The specific gravity is almost the same, and only very sophisticated detection could tell the difference. Colleagues have told me that many dealers have been fooled, and bought the fake bars, with maybe $600 worth of gold on the outside, and a few dollars' worth of tungsten on the inside, for $3000+ thinking they were the original solid gold bars from Swiss Banks, Johnson Matthey, or whoever. The Chinese have apparently managed to replicate the exterior perfectly. Big honey attracts big flies.