Elements for monetizing the silver ounce in British Pounds

From Hugo Salinas Price:

In 2001 we elaborated the text for a Congressional Bill which
would establish the method for monetizing the “Libertad”
silver ounce in Mexico. Today, the idea of silver money is well known among Mexicans and we believe it is only a matter of time for this Bill to be approved. It is presently awaiting a vote in the Congress.

However, this project can also be carried out in any other country; all it requires is for that country to mint its own silver ounce and follow the fundamental outline which we have proposed for the Mexican silver ounce.

The Treasury is the entity that could and should monetize the
silver ounce for the UK. For the British Treasury the monetization of a silver coin would
constitute an important source of income, since all of Europe – indeed the whole world - would wish to possess this coin of supreme quality. We must underline that the emission of this coin and its sale to the public implies no risk at all nor future responsibility for the issuer. Gresham’s Law, working in reverse, guarantees this: good money never seeks to exchange itself for bad money.

Such a coin of superior quality incorporates within itself its own reserve in the form of a silver content which represents the greater part of its monetary value. Issuing this coin does not mean that the pound ceases to be the currency of the UK. The monetized silver ounce becomes a part of currency in circulation, in parallel with paper and digital pounds.

I. Elements for monetizing the silver ounce in British Pounds

This measure should not be regarded as a move to a “silver standard”.

Once the design of the silver ounce has been approved and the coin has been minted it will be given a quoted monetary value by the Treasury. We must state at this point that the effective monetization of the silver ounce requires as an indispensable condition: that it shall not bear an engraved monetary value.

We shall explain the reason for this condition, further on.......read on

Rice Bubbles

Rice is Next

From ZeroHedge.com:

The one commodity which has so far sneaked quietly between the cracks of rampant limit up opens and overnight price surges, just happens to be the most important one: rice.

If the price of rice were to follow the same fate as wheat, not to mention chocolate, and if the world starts getting visuals of what is happening in Egypt transposed a few thousand miles east, smack in the middle of Guangdong province, then not even the Sack Frost dynamic futures lifting duo will be able to do much to instill confidence that the revolution is progressing "better than analyst estimates." And it appears that the seeds of rice's price surge may already have been planted. Bloomberg reports that "U.S. farmers are planting the fewest acres with rice since 1989 just as global demand surpasses production for the first time in four years, driving prices as much as 12 percent higher by December. Plantings in the U.S., the third-biggest shipper, may drop 25 percent this year because growers can earn more from corn and soybeans, according to the median in a Bloomberg survey of nine analysts and farmers.

Rice, the staple food for half the world, declined 4 percent last year, extending a 2.9 percent drop in 2009. The other crops jumped 34 percent or more." Zero Hedge predicted in October of last year that the next real bubble will be rice. We stand by this prediction, which has so far not been validated presumably due to some quite interesting behind the scenes PM-for-food arrangement between China and one of the very popular US TBTFs......read on

Jim Rickards discusses Gold, Multiple Reserve Currencies, Egypt & Inflation

Jim Rickards discusses multiple reserve currencies and a possible gold standard with Eric King of King World News......listen here

Fiat Terrorism

It seems the US is no longer satisified with just creating fiat currency and calling it "money", now as well as being out of money the US has run out of terrorism and feels the need to create fiat terrorists and calling it "terrorism":

Can ElBaradei lead Egypt?

Recent video from the Cairo protests

Oil Disaster In China

China Should Buy More Gold, Silver for Reserves – Chinese Central Bank Advisor

From Gold Corp:

People's Bank of China adviser Xia Bin told the Economic Information Daily today that China should steadily increase its holdings of gold, silver and other precious metals. In an interview with the paper Xia said that “holdings of gold and silver can help establish the yuan as an international currency by increasing China's "final payment capacity." He advised buying precious metals on the dips and while gold and silver are marginally lower today, the remarks are another long term positive for the gold market.

Only last month, Xia made similar comments saying that the People’s Bank of China should diversify their massive $2.7 trillion foreign exchange reserves away from US dollars and increase their gold reserves as a long term strategy in order to help internationalise the yuan. The Chinese wish to make the yuan an accepted international reserve currency and establish it as a currency that will be used for payment and settlement in international trade.

China’s gold holdings, at 1,054 tonnes, remain miniscule compared to the over 8,000 tonnes held by the US Federal Reserve (gold only accounts for 1.6 percent of China’s massive currency reserves). With the supply and demand equation already tight due to international investment demand and central banks having become net buyers rather than net sellers, even a small amount of diversification out of their US dollar holdings and into gold should lead to much higher gold prices.

The reference to silver was important as it marks the first time in modern times that a central bank advisor or official has spoken about diversifying currency reserves into silver. It shows how the Chinese view silver as money rather than as simply a commodity to be consumed. Indeed, the Chinese like most of the world, used silver as currency for most of their history.

The comments may signal the start of a growing shift from seeing silver purely as an industrial commodity to seeing silver more like gold – as both an industrial commodity but more importantly as a store of value and as money. As Milton Friedman pointed out, the major monetary metal throughout history was silver, rather than gold.

Jim Rogers on Inflation & Oil

Robert Fisk: Egypt: Death throes of a dictatorship

By Robert Fisk
The Independent:

The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.

In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter.

Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks. "Mubarak Out – Get Out", and "Your regime is over, Mubarak" have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews, applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed Mubarak's choice of vice-president and his gradual appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over........read on