Gold demand up 42% as countries abandon US dollar in expectation of geopolitical shift

Published time: 27 Oct, 2018 06:36

Central banks around the world are turning to gold as an alternative to the US dollar, which they see as being undermined by America’s aggressive trade policy and geopolitical uncertainty.

Demand for gold was up 42 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2018 among central banks, the World Gold Council (WGC) statistics say. Russia and Turkey are the largest net buyers.

Central banks added a net total of 193.3 tons of bullion in the half of 2018, an 8 percent increase from the 178.6 tons bought in the same period last year. This marks the strongest six months for central bank gold buying since 2015, the WGC notes.

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As of the first half of 2018 central banks increased their gold holdings to $1.36 trillion, around 10 percent of global foreign exchange reserves, the WGC said. An analyst has told RT that the reason behind the move is a wish to diversify from the greenback.

“The United States has long used the dollar to put pressure on competitors. This has always caused anger in the world community. And now the fight against the dollar has reached Europe,” said Eldiyar Muratov, President at Singapore Castle Family Office.

“Russia has stepped up buying gold in its reserves in the face of new US sanctions and a possible disconnection from the dollar system,” added the analyst.

According to Muratov, a similar strategy is now being observed in many countries in Europe and Asia. China, Turkey, Venezuela, Iran, Qatar and Indonesia, are aimed at de-dollarization of economies and foreign trade. All these countries are significantly increasing their gold reserves, the expert says.

As the WGC notes in its report, gold buying is not only about hedging currency risks. “In an environment of heightened geopolitical tensions, gold is an attractive asset because it is not anyone else's liability and does not carry any counterparty risk,” the report says.

“Gold is already a familiar asset class for central banks, but the changing nature of the gold market – with ever-growing consumption coming from developing economies – means that gold is increasingly aligned with emerging market economic patterns. Central banks may increasingly recognize that the rules of the game are changing.”

https://www.rt.com/business/442410-gold-demand-up-dollar/

How our drinking water could help prevent suicide

Some researchers think putting lithium in our water could save lives.

Lithium is a potent psychiatric drug, one of the primary prescribed medications for bipolar disorder. But it’s also an element that occurs naturally all over the Earth’s crust — including in bodies of water. That means that small quantities of lithium wind up in the tap water you consume every day. Just how much is in the water varies quite a bit from place to place.

Naturally, that made researchers curious: Are places with more lithium in the water healthier, mentally? Do places with more lithium have less depression or bipolar or — most importantly of all — fewer suicides?

A 2014 review of studies concluded that the answer was yes: Four of five studies reviewed found that places with higher levels of trace lithium had lower suicide rates. And Nassir Ghaemi, the Tufts psychiatry professor who co-authored that review, argues that the effects are large. High-lithium areas, he says, have suicide rates 50 to 60 percent lower than those of low-lithium areas.

“In general, in the United States, lithium levels are much higher in the Northeast and East Coast and very low in the Mountain West,” he told me on a new episode of the Vox podcast Future Perfect. “And suicide rates track that exactly — much lower suicide rates in the Northeast, and the highest rates of suicide are in the Mountain West.”

If you apply that 50 to 60 percent reduction to the US, where about 45,000 people total died by suicide in 2016, you get a total number of lives saved at around 22,500 to 27,000 a year. That’s likely too high, since you can’t reduce suicide rates in places that are already high-lithium. Ghaemi’s own back-of-the-envelope calculation is that we’d save 15,000 to 25,000.

Ghaemi and a number of other eminent psychiatrists are making a pretty remarkable claim. They think we could save tens of thousands of lives a year with a very simple, low-cost intervention: putting small amounts of lithium, amounts likely too small to have significant side effects, into our drinking water, the way we put fluoride in to protect our teeth.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/24/18010592/future-perfect-podcast-lithium-drinking-water-suicide

The Island (2005)

all this talk about organ harvesting make me think that this movie was a MOCK-umentary…on us!

10 Numbers That Prove That We Are Rapidly Becoming A Nation Of Government Dependents

Today, we live in a country where most workers do not earn enough to support a middle class family, and we are seeing the homelessness crisis spiral out of control in major cities on both coasts. During this election cycle, many conservatives have been freaking out that an increasing number of Democrats are openly embracing socialism, but the truth is that we are already most of the way to becoming a socialist country. In fact, as you will see below, more than half of all Americans currently receive more money from the government than they pay in taxes. We have become absolutely addicted to government money, and this is one of the major trends that is eating away at our nation like cancer

The following are a few numbers that prove that we are rapidly becoming a nation of government dependents…

–Over half the country now receives more in government transfer payments than they pay in taxes.

-According to one recent survey, the cost of living is higher than the median income in 42 U.S. states.

-Today, 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year.

–62 percent of Americans say that their financial situations have not improved since the last presidential election.

And here are six more from my friend Alan Yerushalmi…

According to a FED report, about 40 percent of adults in the U.S. said that if faced with a $400 unexpected expense, they would either not be able to pay it or would do so by selling something or borrowing money

Almost 1 in 3 U.S. households have challenges paying energy bills

About 40% of the American middle class face poverty in retirement

1 in 3 Americans have hardly any retirement savings

Those over 65 have been filing for bankruptcy in droves

Health spending per capita in the U.S. increased nearly 29 fold in the past 40 years, outpacing the growth of the economy

If things are this bad now, how dreadful will the outlook be once we are deep into the next recession?

History has shown that once national governments begin to expand in size, they usually keep expanding until they ultimately collapse.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-26/10-numbers-prove-we-are-rapidly-becoming-nation-government-dependents

Notable???

Some researchers think putting lithium in our water could save lives.

>>3625347

>>3625591

>>3625747

Notable????

Some researchers think putting lithium in our water could save lives.

>>3625347