Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Vladmir Putin is Trying to Buy Up the World's Gold

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Russia has become the world's biggest buyer of gold under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

Over the last decade -- during which Putin was perennially in a position of power, serving as both president and prime minister -- Russia's Central Bank added 570 metric tons of gold, or about 1.25 million pounds. According to Bloomberg, that's about 25 percent more than China has added over the same time period. The report adds that the gold bullion acquired by the Central Bank weighs as much as three Statues of Liberty.

So what motivated the Russian president to become the real-life version of Bond villain Auric Goldfinger?

While the fictional criminal genius had a devious plot to enrich the value of his gold stockpile by irradiating the gold in Fort Knox, Russia needed no such villainy to make its gold more valuable: Over the past decade, economic forces have conspired to cause gold prices (GC) to increase by around 400%. Quantitative easing and economic uncertainty in the wake of the global downturn have fueled a gold rush by skittish investors, sending the price sky-high. And that's made Putin look like a genius for beginning the gold-buying policy in 2005.

One Russian lawmaker, Evgeny Fedorov, laid out the strategy in simple terms.

"The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there's a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency," he said in a phone interview with Bloomberg.

Despite Russia's gold binge, it's still far from the biggest owner of gold. The country's current stockpile of 958 tons is good for only eighth in the world; the U.S. ranks first with 8,134 tons of gold, more than twice as much as runner-up France.

Original Article
Source: walletpop.ca
Author: Matt Brownell

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