This one was brought to my attention by Mr. P.T. and it is, as the saying goes, "a beaut".

Royal Canadian Mint’s Tungsten Gold Twostep?

Now, notice the sequence of the story here as its author, Rob Kirby, outlines it:

The Royal Canadian Mint loses $15 million (Canadian) worth of gold; The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are eventually called in to investigate; In 2009, the Royal Canadian Mint, in its annual report, makes no mention either of the missing gold or its RCMP report; In the same year - 2009 - the Canadian government sold all of its 660 tons of gold bullion (pause and let that sink in); Suddenly, in 2009, both the US mint and the Royal Canadian Mint suspend issuance of their popular US Eagle and Canadian Maple gold coins; Then, in 2011, "suddenly" the Royal Canadian Mint has some $600 million in the sale of "gold-backed receipts."

Now Kirby's conclusion here - that this whole story has something to do with the seemingly constant reappearance of tungsten-salted gold bars - seems to me to be rather sound. After all, clipping and culling have been favorite practices of banks on bullion-based securities and coinage since bullion first became popular as an "international" medium of exchange during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, ca. 800-600B.C., and it became a staple of exchange from the age of the gear classical empires until only recently in the modern age.

Tungsten-salted bars are, of course, an example of "clipping," of diluting the purity of bullion, but Kirby is only suggesting the "culling" part of the equation: if one drills a gold bar to replace it with tungsten, then the replaced gold must go somewhere... and that somewhere, as Kirby alleges, is in the hands of the banksters themselves.

Now let's add one more layer to the whole scenario as we've been following it here on this website, and in conjunction with the bearer bonds scandals: that the clipping-culling operation is tied into two others: (1) the massive obfuscation of the amount of gold really in existence, and amount that varies over whole orders of magnitude in some cases, and (2) the massive rehypothecation of that existing gold (whatever the amount may be).

How would this be done? Kirby's article suggests a possibility. Let's assume that one wishes to sell several "gold-backed" issues of receipts on the same actual physical reserve of gold(and just for fun, let's call those receipts "Gold backed bearer bonds"). Now, suppose we have just enough gold at "today's prices" to sell exactly $1,000,000,000,000 of receipts, but suppose we're building The World's Most Advanced Up To Date Secret Moon Base, and we need $6,000,000,000,000 to do it.

Solution: issue the first $1,000,000,000,000 on an inventoried and recorded deposit of gold bars, complete with the number of the bar. Then, melt the bars, stamp them with new inventory control numbers, and repeat the process for the next trillion of bonds, and again and again, until you've raised the requisite amount of cash.

And for good measure, when the Ecuadorians, Austrians, or Germans come knocking on your vault doors and want an accounting of their gold, you can, just like Mr. Strong to Herr Schacht in 1928, claim that you can't find the gold of the country in question right now.

...that's because its bars have long since been melted down, and recast, and renumbered...

See you on the flip side.