--- good points king louie & j61034322 ---And further to...

--- good points king louie & j61034322 ---

And further to these;

"Moreover, its important to note the differences between a credit crunch in the economy and a sovereign credit crunch.

A credit crunch in the economy, as we experienced in 2008 tends to significantly impact risk assets such as stocks and commodities.

A credit crunch amongst governments has the most impact on bonds and currencies.

Gold and silver, as currencies, will benefit.

Hence, in the last few months, even with downward pressure on most markets, gold has risen while the leveraged gold plays (mining stocks and silver) have held up quite well, unlike in 2008.

Going forward, the macro forces will continue to support the gold stocks for at least a few years.

As we've written in the past, there is little reason to think gold won't continue to outperform in the next few years.

This means that the gold and silver stocks have an even brighter future ahead."

Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/209685-gold-stock-fundamentals-now-vs-2008?source=feed

Apart from the printing-money-out-of-thin-air avalanche, there are diligence issues with the ETFs - LBMA - and massive short-selling in the precious metal markets.

Bottom line: Thanks to the internet, everyone now has access to news/opinions/analysis that are never broadcast in mainstream TV News or print media.

The first questions for me were;

1. Who benefits?

2. What should I look for?

3. Who can I trust?

HC has many great posters + sources - all worth a closer look.

Here is one source that I found useful as a start-point -- see what you think;

**** snip ****

"So who came along to get rid of the Second National Bank? That was Andrew Jackson, and he got rid of it.

But lo and behold, in 1913 the American people were complacent and the Congress was complicit in it went along and said, we have to have a National Bank once again, so the Federal Reserve System was set up. And so weve been struggling.

Weve been struggling since 1913. The dollar was linked to gold up until 1971. But the erosion continued, and now were seeing the erosion of our prosperity.

The other day Bernanke was before the Banking Committee, and I asked him explicitly, because he had just been in Europe, whether he had talked to the other central bankers.

Had they any plan whatsoever for an international reserve currency?
He said no. But you know, hes on the side of the law, not the side of the Constitution, and the law is written that he has no obligation to tell us anything of what he does.

Monetary policy, any kind of conversations with other central bankers, the law explicitly says that he does not have to reveal anything that he does.

So I pressed him a little bit further and said, does the subject gold ever come up? And he said no, and then he quickly corrected himself, because he really wanted to destroy the concept that might someday move in the direction of having a commodity standard. So he quickly said, oh yeah, it comes up when we talk about selling gold.

But what hes saying there is very, very important. He admitted that the central banks do get together, they do talk, and they do dump gold for a very precise reason.

They do that to pretend that the dollar is still more valuable than it really is. In the 1960s up until 71 Nixon and the Republicans and Democrats alike, because the law said the dollar, after Bretton Woods was established in 1944, the dollar was as good as gold at 35 dollars an ounce.

So foreigners started coming in. They knew we had printed all this money, and they started sending the dollars back. And we had given away [a large quantity of] gold at 35 dollars an ounce.

We were running out of gold because we had abused the system, and thats why that had to come to and end.

But in a way they were giving away this gold at this artificially low price to try to prove the dollar was really strong. Well that broke down, and the dollar was devaluated, and weve had all the inflation that came.

But theyve done this now in the last 10 or 15 years Im convinced, because they do admit it. Central Banks in the West especially have been dumping gold to artificially lower the price of gold, in order to artificially pretend the dollar is of great value.

And theyre still doing it, but theyre running out of time and theyre running out of gold.

The gold is getting into the hands of the economic powers who are stronger, and those are the ones who have been working hard, saving money, loaning the money back to us, and are ready to buy up America if we continue to do this.

The Asian banks are buying the gold the Europeans and the Americans and others are dumping gold, so the other nations, including Muslim nations, even before the Banking Committee I did point out to Bernanke that the Iranians had just bought 75 billion dollars worth of gold and put it in reserves."

Source: Speech by US Congressman Ron Paul - 2008.

A. http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-11-23/ron-paul-end-the-fed/

B. http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-06-06/ron-paul-why-big-government-hates-gold/